Computers capable of performing a quintillion (10 to the 18^th power) calculations per second are being planned by the military.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded the first grants to firms it wants to build the so-called exascale computers.

These new machines will far exceed the power of the highest perfrming supercomputers of today which manage just over one petaflop (1000 trillion calculations per second).

The first prototypes are expected to be working by 2018.

An exaflop is the equivalent of one million trillion calculations per second.

DARPA says its research project is needed to help analyze the immense amounts of data that military systems and sensors create.

The research project, called the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, would try to create hardware that “overcomes the limitations of current evolutionary approach".

The idea is characterized by Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors that can fit onto a given piece of silicon will double every 18-24 months.

The limitations of the approach are the mushrooming power, management and structural issues that come up as components shrink.

To avoid the limitations, grant recipients will have to remake chips that use “dramatically” less power per calculation.

The ultimate goal of the project is to “re-invent computing” said the agency in a statement.

It is looking to "develop radically new computer architectures and programming models that are 100 to 1,000 times more energy efficient, with higher performance, and that are easier to program than current systems".

Intel, the chip making giant, graphics card maker Nvidia, MIT and the Sandia National Laboratory are all recipients of the first grants to be used to create prototype exascale machines.