From Mark Poole:
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We are approaching the capability of human brain in one machine. Kurzweil estimated that at 20 petaflops (he also guestimated that it would occur in supercomputers by 2010).
Sequoia's capabilities are measured at 16.3 petaflops
What is also holding true is the exponential decrease in the cost per computing cycle, see below:
What cost $8 trillion in 1961 costs a buck 80, 50 years later.
Fantastic!
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Hardware costs (from Wiki)
The following is a list of examples of computers that demonstrates how drastically performance has increased and price has decreased. The "cost per GFLOPS" is the cost for a set of hardware that would theoretically operate at one billion floating-point operations per second. During the era when no single computing platform was able to achieve one GFLOPS, this table lists the total cost for multiple instances of a fast computing platform which speed sums to one GFLOPS. Otherwise, the least expensive computing platform able to achieve one GFLOPS is listed.
| Date | Approximate cost per GFLOPS | Approximate cost per GFLOPS inflation adjusted to 2011 dollars[41] | Technology | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1961 | US $1,100,000,000,000 ($1.1 trillion) | US $8.3 trillion | About 17 million IBM 1620 units costing $64,000 each | The 1620's multiplication operation takes 17.7 ms.[42] |
| 1984 | $15,000,000 | $33,000,000 | Cray X-MP | |
| 1997 | $30,000 | $42,000 | Two 16-processor Beowulf clusters with Pentium Promicroprocessors[43] | |
| April 2000 | $1,000 | $1,300 | Bunyip Beowulf cluster | Bunyip was the first sub-US$1/MFLOPS computing technology. It won the Gordon Bell Prize in 2000. |
| May 2000 | $640 | $836 | KLAT2 | KLAT2 was the first computing technology which scaled to large applications while staying under US$1/MFLOPS.[44] |
| August 2003 | $82 | $100 | KASY0 | KASY0 was the first sub-US$100/GFLOPS computing technology.[45] |
| August 2007 | $48 | $52 | Microwulf | As of August 2007, this 26.25 GFLOPS "personal" Beowulf cluster can be built for $1256.[46] |
| March 2011 | $1.80 | $1.80 | HPU4Science | This $30,000 cluster was built using only commercially available "gamer" grade hardware.[47] |
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