The incredible evolution of supercomputers' powers, from 1946 to today
The bigger they are, the harder they compute
By Sara Chodosh Yesterday at 12:30pm
The first supercomputer went live in 1965. Since then, the computing power of these mega machines has grown exponentially.
Engineers measured early computing devices in kilo-girls, a unit roughly equal to the calculating ability of a thousand women. By the time the first supercomputer arrived in 1965, we needed a larger unit. Thus, FLOPS, or floating point operations (a type of calculation) per second.
In 1946, ENIAC, the first (nonsuper) computer, processed about 500 FLOPS. Today’s supers crunch petaFLOPS—or 1,000 trillion. Shrinking transistor size lets more electronics fit in the same space, but processing so much data requires a complex design, intricate cooling systems, and openings for humans to access hardware. That’s why supercomputers stay supersize.
http://www.popsci.com/supercomputers-then-and-now
