How close are modern home computers to being as fast as a supercomputer 15 years ago?

Question

What stage is our computers (average) when compared to supercomputers of old?

Answer 1

A typical high-end supercomputer from 15 years ago had a peak performance of about 2 GFLOPS. A modern Core i7 hexacore is theoretically capable of about 100 GFLOPS and a modern Radeon 5970 is theoretically capable of 900 GFLOPS.



This isn't a very fair comparison though because supercomputers can typically actually deliver a much higher percentage of their theoretical peak computation speed than GPUs or modern CPUs can. However, typical high-end desktop CPU today can actually deliver about 50 GLOPS, so it's realistically about 25 times faster than a mid-range supercomputer from 15 years ago.



The fastest supercomputer in the world 15 years ago, Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory's 'Digital Wind Tunnel' had a real-world performance of 170 GFLOPS and a peak performance of 240 GFLOPS. A quad hexa-core Xeon desktop could exceed that, and would cost you less than $20,000.

Answer 2

"Debuting in 1995, the successor Cray T3E™ supercomputer was the world's best-selling MPP system. And the Cray T3E-1200E™ system was the first supercomputer to sustain one teraflop (one trillion floating-point operations per second) on a real-world application"



http://www.cray.com/About/History.aspx



The latest Core i7 chips don't get anywhere near that - they have about about a tenth of that power. You'd have to go a bit further back in time to find a 'supercomputer' of a similar power. However, as the article shows they hadn't reached the power of a Core i7 980X (just over 100GFlops) by 1990. It'll be a while though before your average desktop computer can match the Jaguar XT at well over 1 Petaflop.

Answer 3

15 years ago. June 7, 1995. I remember that day as if it was yesterday. I was cumming home from work that day, and I immediately walked to my Supercomputer. It was very big. Like an elephant! I started the computer, and it took 2 hours 8 minutes and 35 seconds to start up. Compared to Windows 7, which is only 1 hour. Then, I played my favorite game on my Supercomputer: Solitaire. It took 12 minutes to start the little application, compared to 9 minutes and 59 seconds to start up Solitaire on Windows 7. 3 minutes later, my Supercomputer shut down by itself due to overheating. Compared to Windows 7, 4 minutes.



Windows 7 is obviously better than the Supercomputer of 15 years earlier.

Answer 4

Probably not as fast.