Fig. 2 |. Performance of landmark simulations compared with the world’s fastest supercomputers and moore’s law trend.

Plot of the computational system ranked first (blue) and the highest ranked academic computer (orange) as reported in R_max according to the LINPACK benchmark as assembled in the Top500 supercomputer lists (www.top500.org). R_max is the unit used to define computer performance in TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second). Landmark simulations (green diamonds) are dated assuming calculations were performed about a year before publication, except for the publications in 1998, which we assumed were performed in 1996. These include, from 1996 to the present, 25-bp DNA using National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) machines¹⁴⁴; villin protein¹⁴⁵ using the Cray T3E900; bc₁ membrane complex¹⁴⁶ using the Cray T3E900; 12-bp DNA¹⁴⁷ using MareNostrum/Barcelona; Fip35 protein¹⁴⁸ using NCSA Abe clusters; nuclear core complex¹⁵¹ using Blue Waters; influenza A virus¹⁵² using the Jade Supercomputer; CypA/CA complex¹⁵⁴ using Blue Waters; HIV-1 capsid⁷ using Titan Cray XK7; GATA4 gene³⁹ using Trinity Phase 2; and influenza A virus H1N1³⁶ using Blue Waters. As Blue Waters has opted out of the Top500, we use estimates of sustained system performance/sustained petascale performance (SSP/SPP) from 2012 and 2020. For system size and simulation time of each landmark simulation, see Fig. 1.