From Giga Flop to Tera Flop!

The performance delivered by any Super Computer has increased anything, like a rocket ever since their inception! Continuous implementations in microprocessor and semiconductor technology, interconnections and relatively the never failing Moore's law have always hiked the pick performance of a Supercomputer year by year.

Within just about a decade, now some of the top Supercomputers deliver their performance in Teraflops and hence, talking and measuring them in Gigaflops has become like a history. Top500.org (http://www.top500.org) is an official benchmarking group that measures the top notch delivery of 500 most powerful Supercomputers by using the high performance linpack (www.netlib.org/linpack) benchmark as a yardstick twice a year.

Let us now examine the peak performance of some the top500 #1 ranking Supercomputers in the last decade. :

This was the first phase:

• Intel Paragon XP/S @ Touchstone Delta System CalTech, 1993, 143.4 Gigaflops
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind tunnel @ National Aerospace Laboratory Japan, 1993, 170 Gigaflops
• Thinking Machine Corporation, CM-5, 1995
• Hitachi CP-PACS, 368.2 Gigaflops, 1996

Here comes the second phase: (Observe the hike in performance)

• IBM ASCI-Red @ Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, 1338 Gigaflops, 1997
• IBM ASCI-Red @ Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, 2121 Gigaflops, 1999
• IBM ASCI-White @ LLNL, 7304 Gigaflops, 2000

Here comes the third but slightly short phase:

• NEC, The Earth Simulator @ the Earth Simulator Center (ESC), Japan, 35860 Gigaflops, 2002

Finally Supercomputers delivers @ Teraflops, it is really increadible.

• IBM Blue Gene @ LLNL, 280.6 Teraflops (An increadible 280600 Gigaflops), on the top since 2004

Friends, this progress is just a glimpse of last 13-15 years, but the entire hardware as well as software technology behind this phenomena is now around almost 65 years old. To conclude this entery we have to remember Mr. Gordon Moore once again to just predict the future of Supercomputing!!

By the way the next list of top500 is to be launched in the June 2007 at ISC 07, Germeny (http://www.supercomp.de/). We will be back here again on this topic as the new list is declared..... till then wait for YABP!