3 ms·

Most (all?) of those machines are clusters that scale mostly by throwing in nodes. Even if you have completely static technology, you'll see an exponential tre

• a3voices 13y ago
  Except it is clearly scaling much faster than economic growth.
• wmf 13y ago
  But supercomputer customers' budgets aren't unlimited. If chips no longer get cheaper at some point they probably won't be able to afford more nodes.
• ghshephard 13y ago
  Completely agree with you, which is why system #500 is more interesting than the "Nation State" systems in the first hundred positions or so. System #500 is going to be more closely aligned to the growth in technology. Also - Economic growth [1] since 2001 has averaged 3.78% /year, for a total of 61% growth in 12 years - if computers had progressed in accordance with economic growth, than I would expect, all else equal, for systems to be .61x more powerful. In that same period, system #500 went from 100 gigaflops to 100 teraflops, resulting in systems approx 1000x more powerful. So - I agree that we'll see an exponential trend, regardless of whether technology improves, it's just that the curve is going to flatten (particularly on a log10 scale). [1] http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year
• nly 13y ago
  Throwing in nodes doesn't help you get past the $/Gflop barrier, which is ultimately what is important.