Infographic Depicts History of Top Supercomputers

Lukas Thoms has posted a wonderful visual history of high performance computing, including the new 2.5 Petaflop Tianhe-1A supercomputer.

It seems like this is a record that gets broken pretty often, and it’s true! I did some research, and some math, and found out we’ve come quite a long way. So long, that I decided to spend a few hours in Photoshop creating a nice infographic to show just how far we’ve come. The area of each circle represents each record’s relative computing power. They’re all recorded in FLOPS, which stands for Floating Point Operations. MFLOPS stands for megaflops, or 1,000,000 operations. G stands for Giga, T for tera, and P for peta. Each one increases the unit by a magnitude of 1000.