Super Computing - An Incredible Rise In Computing Power

The following chart shows the incredible rise in supercomputing power over the last 60 years, shown in floating point operations (FLOPS) per second (e.g. how many calculations involving a decimal point can be done per second):

Source: Wikipedia

That graph curve alone would be impressive enough, but it's worth pointing out that the graph is done on a logarithmic scale, which means each upwards increment is ten to the power X larger than the last one. If it was plotted on a linear scale then the progress is so mind blowing it'd be completely unreadable on a graph.

Basically, back in the 1940s the world's most powerful computer could do fewer than one floating point calculation per second.

Today we're at the stage where a super computer can do 1017 floating point calculations per second, that's one hundred quadrillion calculations, or 100,000,000,000,000,000, per second.

Even if we take the last few years since 2008 and plot it on a linear graph you can see the rate of progress isn't slowing down. This one is shown in petaflops which is 1015 calculations per second, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second:

Source: Figures from Wikipedia

Super computers in development, or proposed do be developed, include a weather modelling computer that could produce an estimated 1021 FLOPS or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second by the year 2030.

Sooner or later we'll reach the limits of what existing silicon chips can do, but don't expect this continual rise in power to end there. A new generation of quantum computers is being developed that will be orders of magnitude more powerful than the 'traditional computers' described above!

If you're finding all this a little hard to get your head around, your PS4 games console can do 102.4 giga FLOPS and an XBox One can do 112 giga FLOPS. In 1993 that would be achievable only with the world's fastest super computer, which at the time was Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel at the National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan (124.50 giga FLOPS) and looked like this:

Source: Fujitsu