Intel said on Monday that it would build the US's most powerful supercomputer, so fast that it could process 1 quintillion — 1 billion times 1 billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 — calculations per second.

To put that in perspective: If every person on Earth did one calculation (say, a math problem involving algebra) per second, it would take everyone over four years to do all the calculations Aurora could do in one second.

Intel and the US Department of Energy said Aurora would be the US's first exascale supercomputer, with a performance of 1 exaflop, when it's completed in 2021.

That kind of number-crunching brawn, the computer's creators hope, will enable great leaps in everything from cancer research to renewable-energy development.

Aurora, set to be developed by Intel and its subcontractor Cray at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, would far surpass the abilities of supercomputers today. It's likely to be the most powerful supercomputer in not just the US but the world, though Rick Stevens, an associate laboratory director at Argonne, said that other countries might also be working on exascale supercomputers.

Rajeeb Hazra, a corporate vice president and general manager at Intel.

The effort marks a "transformational" moment in the evolution of high-performance computing, Rajeeb Hazra, an Intel corporate vice president and general manager of its enterprise and government group, told Business Insider.