While LINPACK and HPCG represent reasonable upper and lower bounds of performance, respectively, neither reflects the complexity of actual applications. The Gordon Bell Prize, awarded for outstanding achievements in high-performance computing applications, provides a more relevant measure . These applications, often solving real scientific problems, have demonstrated performance nearing the exaflop threshold . Achieving this requires monumental efforts: entire codebases are rewritten by interdisciplinary teams of physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. New algorithms are developed, and implementations are tailored to exploit the specific features of the target architectures. In contrast, legacy codes, which constitute the bulk of real-world applications, lag significantly behind. These codes were not designed with exascale capabilities in mind and thus fall short of the exaflop performance. The challenge ahead lies in bridging this gap, ensuring that applications needing exascale capabilities can harness the full potential of exascale systems.