How many teraflops does your PC have?

A character in a television show, an older fellow, was marveling at the advances in technology. With a faraway, wondrous look he said he hoped to live for many more years to see what’s coming next. The scene’s foreshadowing was obvious. You, the viewer, knew exactly what was coming next.

This scene from this show, whose name I can’t recall, stuck with me for some reason. The character, even though he wouldn’t be returning next season after keeling over on his desk, had to have some idea of what was on the tech horizon. We certainly do.

In late 1996, the world’s computing marvel was the Sandia National Laboratories ASCI Red supercomputer. It was the first system to break the teraflop barrier late that year. (A teraflop equals a trillion floating points per second). When the system went into production in 1997, it had more than 9,000 Pentium Pro processors and had cost $55 million.

Today, that fastest computer in the world is the half-petaflop IBM Blue Gene at 478.2 TFLOPS. IBM says it will double that speed next year and cross the petaflop barrier – so in just over a decade the world will have gone from achieving teraflop performance to reaching a petaflop.

Multicore chips are driving these performance gains. IBM’s system has some 213,000 processing cores. And the number of processors going into systems is growing at an ever accelerating rate.

Here are some figures from the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

In November, 2001: The total number of processors used in all the systems that make up the Top500 list equal 161,674 processors.

2003: Processor count on the Top 500 list reaches 267,021.

2005: Total number of processor cores: 732,477

2007: 1.64 million processor cores.

The Sandia ASCI Red (which has been retired) wouldn’t be eligible for the Top500 list today. The minimum performance required to make this list is at least 6 teraflops, and by 2015 it will be at least a petaflop, according to Erich Strohmaier, one of the authors of the Top500 and a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He outlined this performance trajectory at last month’s Supercomputer 07 conference.

What cost Sandia $55 million a decade ago – for something that wasn’t much more than a teraflop of power – can be purchased today for less than $100,000. Teraflop or near teraflop performance is now available in relatively small blade servers.

By 2015, every computer on the Top 500 list will be a petaflop or better, and your laptop may have the same kind of power that U.S. paid millions of dollars for not too many years ago.

These price/performance gains are predictable based on Moore’s Law but nonetheless astonishing when viewed over a period of years. The future holds a lot of wonders, for sure, but there’s much to be said for appreciating what has happened in the immediate past.