Supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major qualitative changes in the way science is done.

"The new capability allows you to do fundamentally new physics and tackle new problems," said Thomas Zacharia, who heads up computer science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee"And it will accelerate the transition from basic research to applied technology

Its only a matter of time until they take over!

Just a note..

The Cray XT, called Jaguar, has a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops, (quadrillion floating point operations, or calculations) per second.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117121243.htm