FLOPS - Records

Records

In late 1996 Intel's ASCI_Red was the worlds first computer to achieve one TFLOP and beyond. ASCI Red earned a reputation for reliability that some veterans say has never been beat. Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price, and performance.”

NEC's SX-9 supercomputer was the world's first vector processor to exceed 100 gigaFLOPS per single core. IBM's supercomputer dubbed Roadrunner was the first to reach a sustained performance of 1 petaFLOPS, as measured by the Linpack benchmark. As of June 2011, the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world combine for 58.9 petaFLOPS of computing power.

For comparison, a hand-held calculator performs relatively few FLOPS. Each calculation request, such as to add or subtract two numbers, requires only a single operation, so there is rarely any need for its response time to exceed what the operator can physically use. A computer response time below 0.1 second in a calculation context is usually perceived as instantaneous by a human operator, so a simple calculator needs only about 10 FLOPS to be considered functional.

In June 2006, a new computer was announced by Japanese research institute RIKEN, the MDGRAPE-3. The computer's performance tops out at one petaFLOPS, almost two times faster than the Blue Gene/L, but MDGRAPE-3 is not a general purpose computer, which is why it does not appear in the Top500.org list. It has special-purpose pipelines for simulating molecular dynamics.

By 2007, Intel Corporation unveiled the experimental multi-core POLARIS chip, which achieves 1 TFLOPS at 3.13 GHz. The 80-core chip can raise this result to 2 TFLOPS at 6.26 GHz, although the thermal dissipation at this frequency exceeds 190 watts.

On June 26, 2007, IBM announced the second generation of its top supercomputer, dubbed Blue Gene/P and designed to continuously operate at speeds exceeding one petaFLOPS. When configured to do so, it can reach speeds in excess of three petaFLOPS.

In June 2007, Top500.org reported the fastest computer in the world to be the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, measuring a peak of 596 teraFLOPS. The Cray XT4 hit second place with 101.7 teraFLOPS.

On October 25, 2007, NEC Corporation of Japan issued a press release announcing its SX series model SX-9, claiming it to be the world's fastest vector supercomputer. The SX-9 features the first CPU capable of a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS per single core.

On February 4, 2008, the NSF and the University of Texas opened full scale research runs on an AMD, Sun supercomputer named Ranger, the most powerful supercomputing system in the world for open science research, which operates at sustained speed of half a petaFLOPS.

On May 25, 2008, an American supercomputer built by IBM, named 'Roadrunner', reached the computing milestone of one petaflop by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. It headed the June 2008 and November 2008 TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers (excluding grid computers). The computer is located at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the computer's name refers to the New Mexico state bird, the Greater Roadrunner.

In June 2008, AMD released ATI Radeon HD4800 series, which are reported to be the first GPUs to achieve one teraFLOPS scale. On August 12, 2008 AMD released the ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics card with two Radeon R770 GPUs totaling 2.4 teraFLOPS.

In November 2008, an upgrade to the Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) raised the system's computing power to a peak 1.64 “petaflops,” or a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second, making Jaguar the world’s first petaflop system dedicated to open research. In early 2009 the supercomputer was named after a mythical creature, Kraken. Kraken was declared the world's fastest university-managed supercomputer and sixth fastest overall in the 2009 TOP500 list, which is the global standard for ranking supercomputers. In 2010 Kraken was upgraded and can operate faster and is more powerful.

In 2009, the Cray Jaguar performed at 1.75 petaFLOPS, beating the IBM Roadrunner for the number one spot on the TOP500 list.

In October 2010, China unveiled the Tianhe-I, a supercomputer that operates at a peak computing rate of 2.5 petaflops.

As of 2010, the fastest six-core PC processor reaches 109 gigaFLOPS (Intel Core i7 980 XE) in double precision calculations. GPUs are considerably more powerful. For example, Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU computing processors perform around 515 gigaFLOPS in double precision calculations, and the AMD FireStream 9270 peaks at 240 gigaFLOPS. In single precision performance, Nvidia Tesla C2050 computing processors perform around 1.03 teraFLOPS and the AMD FireStream 9270 cards peak at 1.2 teraFLOPS. Both Nvidia and AMD's consumer gaming GPUs may reach higher FLOPS. For example, AMD’s HemlockXT 5970 reaches 928 gigaFLOPS in double precision calculations with two GPUs on board and the Nvidia GTX 480 reaches 672 gigaFLOPS with one GPU on board.

On December 2, 2010, the US Air Force unveiled a defense supercomputer made up of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles that can run 500 trillion floating-point operations per second. (500 teraFLOPS)

In November 2011, it was announced that Japan had achieved 10.51 petaflops with its K computer. It is still under development and software performance tuning is currently underway. It has 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors in 864 racks, with theoretical performance of 11.28 petaflops. It is named after the Japanese word "kei", which stands for 10 quadrillion, corresponding to the target speed of 10 petaFLOPS.

On November 15, 2011, Intel demonstrated a single x86-based processor, code-named "Knights Corner," sustaining more than a TeraFlop on a wide range of DGEMM operations. Intel emphasized during the demonstration this was a sustained TeraFlop (not "raw TeraFlop" used by others to get higher but less meaningful numbers), and that it was the first general purpose processor to ever cross a TeraFlop.

On June 18, 2012, IBM's Sequoia supercomputer system, based at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), reached 16 petaFLOPS, setting the world record and claiming first place in the latest TOP500 list.

On October 11, 2011, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced it was building a 20 petaflop supercomputer, named Titan, which became operational in October 2012. the hybrid Titan system combines AMD Opteron processors with “Kepler” NVIDIA Tesla graphic processing unit (GPU) technologies. The upgrade has now been completed on Titan, and according to the Linpack benchmark it operates at 17.59 petaFLOPS, which is the current world record.