FIG. 1.

Development of leading edge computer capabilities, as documented through the performance of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, as measured on dense linear algebra in units of double precision floating-point operations per second (Flops/s). The data are adapted from Top500.org and compared against the performance of an eight-core laptop, which evidently has performance comparable to the world’s fastest supercomputer of the mid-1990s to late-1990s.