Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Supercomputers and the Evolution of Computing Power

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

If you’ve been around long enough, and by that, I only mean a couple of years, you have probably observed the one fundamental truth about computers: they always get faster.  While games and web browning might seem faster, the average person’s computer usage doesn’t necessarily express just how much more powerful computers have become.  In particular, for several decades, supercomputers have been developed which are vastly more powerful than what is one your desk or in your pocket. Unless that is, you make comparisons over time… Learn more about supercomputers, the evolution of computing power and how your computer stacks up to supercomputers of the past on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've been around long enough, and by that I mean only a couple of years, you've probably observed one of the fundamental truths about computers. They always get faster. While games and web browsing might seem faster, the average person's computer usage doesn't necessarily express just how much more powerful computers have become. In particular, for several decades, supercomputers have been developed, which are vastly more powerful than what is on your desk score in your pocket. Unless that is, you make comparisons over time. Learn more about supercomputers, the evolution of computing power, and how your computer stacks up to supercomputers of the past on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. The genesis of this episode has to do with the fact that I've heard many times, that your smartphone is more powerful than the computer that landed the astronauts on the moon. I really don't doubt that fact, but I was curious as to the magnitude of the truth. Just how much more powerful are today's smartphones compared to the computers used in the Apollo lunar module?

That led me down a rabbit hole of the most powerful computers in history, what we would call today supercomputers, and the shocking increase in computing power since the era of computers began. Before we get into these powerful computers, we first have to have a way to compare one computer with another. Many different benchmarks and metrics have been used throughout computer history. If you ever look at a review of a computer, you'll see a host of tests that are run to evaluate performance. What we need is something that can be used over time for many different types of computers. In the past, you may have heard of computers that bragged about the number of transistors in a processor. In the 1990s and 2000s, many computers bragged about clock speed in terms of mega or gigahertz.

And today, computers talk about the number of cores in their CPUs. All of these things factor into computing power. The metric that's usually used to measure computing power across all manner of computer devices, is Flops, which stands for floating point operations per second. The question you might now have is what is a floating point operation? A floating point operation is a computation involving floating point numbers. Flooding point numbers represent real numbers that can have fractional parts, like 3.14 or negative 0.001, as opposed to integers, which are whole numbers. Basically, Finally, Flops is the number of mathematical calculations a computer can perform each second,

regardless the number of transistors, cores, or clock speed. There are other benchmarks out there for measuring real-world performance, but this is a very good way to compare different types of computers across different periods of time. I'm not going to cover every computer which came out over the years, but rather highlight several computers that illustrate the growth in computing power. So with that, let's start with the power. of the very first computer. The electronic numerical integrator and computer, or ENIAC, which was built in 1946. Enniac was the first general-purpose computer, and it was built using vacuum tubes,

before integrated circuits or transistors were even invented. It was built by the University of Pennsylvania, and it was used to more quickly perform calculations for artillery estimates and engineering projects. Eniac had a power of approximately 500 flops. I've seen EFELP. I've seen estimates that were lower and higher, but as we'll see, the difference is inconsequential considering the comparisons that we're going to be making. Now let's move forward to 1952. IBM released the IBM 701 computer. While IBM had been in the business machine game for decades, this was IBM's first commercial scientific computer used primarily by government and scientific institutions. The 701 had a power of approximately 16,000 flops, or 16 kiloflops.

In just six years, computing power had increased 32-fold. If you think a 32-fold increase is impressive, in the words of Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, you ain't seen nothing yet. In 1962, IBM released the IBM-70-30 stretch, their first computer to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes. This technical change ushered in a massive jump in computing power. The 70-30 stretch was one of the first computers to achieve $1,000,000. flops, or one mega-flop.

Just three years later in 1964, the Control Data Corporation released its flagship computer, the CDC 6600. The CDC-6600 was designed by a controlled data employee named Seymour Cray, a name we will hear more from in a moment. The CDC-6600 had a computing power of three megaflops, a three-fold increase in power over the IBM-70-30 stretch. This was the first computer which was ever called a supercomputer. Unlike the IBM 70-30 stretch, it used an integrated circuit as a central processor.

The cost at the time was $2.37 million. Adjusted for inflation, it would cost about $24 million today. The CDC 6600 held the title as the world's fastest computer for five years, until it was replaced by the CDC 7600, which reached a performance of 10.000. 10 megaflops. 1972, Seymour Cray Left Control Data Corporation to start his own company, Cray Research, and then later the Cray Computer Corporation. In 1975, Cray released the Cray One supercomputer.

It was a revolutionary new computer and had a massive jump computing power. It had a computing power of 160 megaflops, the first computer to break the 100-Maglop barrier. It was sold for $7.9 million in 1977. which would be over $40 million today. The Cray 1 was very successful, with over 100 units sold to organizations such as Los Alamos National Labs. With every new model of supercomputer,

Seymour Cray attempted to get at least a 10-fold increase in improvement in computing power. And he did just that with the release of the Cray 2 in 1979. The Cray 2 introduced liquid cooling to improve its performance, and it had a computing power of 1.9 billion flops or 1.9 gigaflops. It sold for $16 million at its release and would be worth almost $70 million today. Cray lost the title of the Most Powerful Computer in 1986 when ETA Systems, a spinoff of Control Data Corp, released the ETA 10. The ETA 10 had a performance of 10 gigaflops.

The ETA 10 was powerful, but it just didn't say. very well. In 1992, Intel released the Intel Paragon. The Paragon was different in that it was a massively parallel computer that used a large number of simpler chips and divided out problems to be calculated amongst the processors. The Intel Paragon had a power of 143 gigaflops. In 1997, the U.S. government's accelerated strategic computing initiative or ASCII unveiled the ASCY red computer. It was designed for nuclear weapons testing as underground testing. had recently been banned by treaty. It had a computational power of 1.8 trillion flops, or 1.8 terraflops,

becoming the first computer to ever break the terraflop barrier. Five years later, in 2002, the NEC Corporation in Japan created the Earth Simulator, which had a power of 35 taraflops. And six years later, in 2008, IBM retook the title of the world's most powerful computer with the IBM Roadrunner. They didn't just break the 100-teraflop barrier. The Roadrunner had a power of 1,105 trillion flops, or 1.1 quadrillion flops, or, to put it more succinctly, 1.1 petaflops.

In 2011, the K-computer by the Fujitsu Corporation reached 10.5 petaflops. And in 2018, the IBM Summit reached 200 petaflops. The current reigning champion for the most powerful computer, in the world, at the time of this recording, is the Frontier Supercomputer, operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was operational in 2022. It has a theoretical top performance of 1.1 quintillion flops or 1.1 exaflops. So just to summarize and put this into perspective, the world's most powerful computer today, the frontier, is approximately 10 quadrillion. million times more powerful as the ENIAC, which was released almost 80 years ago.

The improvement in performance is so great that we have to resort to numbers such as quadrillions and quintillions, which we otherwise never have to use. I should add that most of the supercomputers over the last several decades have been a battery of smaller computers. In fact, if you look at the photos of the frontier supercomputer, it looks very similar to what you would find in a server room or a server farm. the likes of which run large websites like Netflix or Facebook. The difference is that a supercomputer is designed to tackle a single problem.

With all of this, I now want to go back to my original question at the top of the episode. Let's start with the power of the computer that was used to land on the moon. The computer used in the Apollo program was the Apollo Guidance Computer. It was created to meet the specific parameters of the Apollo program with regards to power and weight. It got the job done. but it wasn't very powerful. The Apollo guidance computer had a total computing power of about

85 kilaflops. So it was more powerful than the 1952 IBM 701 computer, but dramatically less powerful than the 1961 IBM 7030 stretch. Most of us will never use a supercomputer and certainly not the Apollo guidance computer. Although, as an aside,

there are people in this audience who probably do use supercomputers. Most of you are familiar with personal computing devices of some sort. So how do they stack up against supercomputers of the past? The Apple One personal computer released in 1976 had a power of 60 kiloflops. It wasn't quite as powerful as the Apollo Guidance computer, but it was something that computer enthusiasts could actually buy. The first real personal computer, the IBM PC, was released in 1981 and had a power of 330 kilaflops. It's not as powerful as the IBM 70-30 stretch released 20 years earlier, but it sold for $1,500

instead of $7.7 million. The original Intel Pentium Computer released in 1993 had a power of approximately 60 megaplops, depending on the configuration. This would have put it on a par with an early 1970 supercomputer, again at a fraction of the price. The 1997 Pentium 2 had a power of approximately 350 megaplops, again depending on a bar, the configuration and the 1999 Pentium 3 at a power of 1.3 gigaflops. Once again, there's about a 20-year leg between the Cray 2 supercomputer and the Pentium 3, both of which are about the same power.

In the 2000s, Intel began to sell multi-core processors. The 2006 Intel Core 2 Duo could achieve a power of 20 gigaflops, and this was twice as powerful as the 1986 ETA-10 supercomputer. The 1992 Intel Paragon supercomputer achieved 143 gigaflops. 20 years later in 2012, the Intel Core I-7 achieved approximately 100 gigaflops. The 2020 Apple M1 processor, on which I record this podcast, has a power of about 2.6 terraflops, and that is more powerful than the 1997 Asky Red supercomputer. So there has roughly been a 20-year lag between

supercomputers and desktop computers. That leg is getting slightly longer just because the rate of supercomputer power increased when they began becoming massively parallel, and they could just throw smaller computers at the problem to increase the power. But what about the smartphone in your pocket? Are you carrying a supercomputer around with you right now? The first Apple iPhone released in 2007 had a power of five megaflops, but the power increased quickly.

By the iPhone 4 in 2010, it had reached one gigaflop. Two years later in 2012, the Samsung Galaxy S3 reached 10 gigaflops, and five years after that in 2017, the iPhone X reached 200 gigaflops. My personal smartphone, an Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max, their current version at the time of this recording, has a computing power of 2.15 terraflops. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has a similar amount of computing power. So, do you have a supercomputer in your pocket?

Let's put it this way. The original Jurassic Park movie released in 1993 had its CGI effects created on three KrayXMP supercomputers, each of which had a power of about 800 megaplops. So modern smartphones have a power over a hundred times greater than the supercomputers that made Jurassic Park. As for the computer that landed on the moon, and my initial question to start off this episode, whatever desktop computer or smartphone that you might have,

it is vastly more powerful. An iPhone 15 Pro is about 25 million times more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer. If there is now an approximately 25-year lag between the world's most powerful supercomputer and a smartphone? Does that mean in the year 2049 everyone will have smartphones that can perform over an exa-flop of calculations? Maybe.

And in fact, probably. To say that computing power has increased a lot is actually a bit of an understatement. Over the last 80 years, computing power has exploded, which is why we all now carry supercomputers in our pockets. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon,

including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the completionist club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group, or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.