Then and now: The fastest supercomputers 30 years apart
- By John Breeden II
- Jun 21, 2013
While marking GCN’s 30th year, we’re taking a look at how far computing has progressed in three decades. Here’s a look at the most powerful supercomputers of 1982 and 2012.
Stylish supercomputer vs. Sleek supercomputer
| |
Cray X-MP
|
Titan
|
| Year of manufacture |
1982 |
2012 |
| Cost |
$15 million (with all four cores installed) ($1.5 million credit offered for trade-in of older Cray 1 system) |
$97 million ($60 million upgrade from Jaguar system) |
| Performance |
800 megaflops (millions of calculations per second) |
17.59 petaflops (trillions of calculations per second) |
| Number of CPUs |
Between one and four |
18,688 AMD Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs and 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs |
| Memory |
16M SDRAM |
710 terabytes |
| Storage |
Up to 32 disk storage units with 1.2 gigabytes disk space each at 10MB/s transfer rates |
10 petabytes at 240 GB/s transfer rate |
| Operating System |
Cray Operating System |
Cray Linux Environment |
| Supercomputer Ranking |
Fastest Computer in the world from 1982 to 1985 |
Currently the fastest computer in the world |
About the Author
John Breeden II is a freelance technology writer for GCN.