The Earlier computing devices have measuring units that will not only surprise you but infact give a shocking preview of history of computing. It will not only give the importance of women in the earlier computing but also give the vary important fact that women contributed a major non told share in the calculation dynamics.
Engineers used to measure the earlier computing devices in Kilo-Girls , a unit roughly equal to the calculating ability of the thousand women.
When the first super computer was invented in 1965 , a larger unit is required to determine the computation power of the machines. Therefore the Flops came into this universe. Flops are termed as floating point operations per seconds. In 1946 , ENIAC, the first non-super computer processed about 500 Flops. Today super-computer crunches peta FLOPS which is equivalent to 1000 trillion computations.
As the time moves on the shrinking of transistor size allows the accumulation of more electronics that can be fitted in a space. But processing so much data requires a complex design , very good and intricate cooling systems. Also the suitable interface for humans to operate and access the hardware. Lets look at some of the important super computers and their uses.
Engineers used to measure the earlier computing devices in Kilo-Girls , a unit roughly equal to the calculating ability of the thousand women
CDC 6600 is used in cern . It helps the cern engineers to rapidly sift approx 3 million cern’s experimental research images per year.
ASCI RED used by the united states , helped us to model the nuclear weapons capabilities so that it can avoid the underground test.
IBM Sequoia is enabling the Stanford engineers to study the jet engines by using its more than 1 million cores.
Sunway TaihuLight with its processing speed 93 peta Flops by trading the slower memory for higher energy efficiency.
Super Computer | MakeYear | Computation Power | Size |
ENIAC | 1946 | 500 Flops | 1800 square feet |
CDC 6600 | 1965 | 3Million Flops | 500 square feet |
IBM System/360 Model 91 | 1968 | 5 Million Flops | 931.5 square feet |
CRAY-1 | 1976 | 160 Million Flops | 70 square feet |
CRAY X-MP | 1982 | 800 Million Flops | 112 square feet |
CRAY-2 | 1985 | 1.9 Billion Flops | 16 square feet |
ASCI RED | 1997 | 2 Trillion Flops | 1600 square feet |
ASCI White | 2001 | 7 Trillion Flops | 12000 square feet |
NEC Earth Simulator | 2002 | 36 Trillion Flops | 34000 square feet |
IBM Blue Gene/L | 2005 | 470 Trillion Flops | 2500 square feet |
IBM Sequoia | 2012 | 16 QUAD Flops | 3422 square feet |
NUDT TIANHE-2 | 2013 | 34 Quad Flops | 7750 square feet |
SUNWAY TAIHULIGHT | 2016 | 93 QUAD Flops | 1960 square feet |
You can read more about Kilo-Girls computing units in this article.