Computer hardware has become infinitely more powerful through the years, a trend that has allowed computer makers to push the performance to levels we almost thought were impossible just a decade earlier. The exponential growth of computing performance is very noticeable when you examine how the performance of the world’s most powerful computer systems, the supercomputers, has changed over time.

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Here is the performance of the fastest supercomputer in the world, the past 15 years:

  • Top in 2010: 2.57 petaflops
  • Top in 2005: 280.6 teraflops
  • Top in 2000: 4.94 teraflops
  • Top in 1995: 170 gigaflops

If we set the fastest supercomputer in 1995 as the baseline:

  • The top supercomputer in 2000 was 19 times faster.
  • The top supercomputer in 2005 was 1,650 times faster.
  • The top supercomputer in 2010 was 15,100 times faster.

Or, illustrated with a chart:

Supercomputing performance over the past 15 years

Also see:
Rewriting Moores Law with faster improvement in computer speed using IBM silicon photonics