Plot of the fastest computer over time... The two curves represent the two measures (OPS and FLOPS) which have been used to quantify supercomputer speed, these are approximately the same (but not quite).

First and Third columns of data taken from en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Supercomputer and put into file "sc". Removed UPenn ENIAC entry. Used python 2.6 code as follows (I make no excuses for readability/general quality):

<source lang="python">

1. !/usr/bin/python

fid = open("sc") lastThing = 1066 lineno=-1 sizedic={"O":1,

        "k":1e3,
        "M":1e6,
        "G":1e9,
        "T":1e12,
        "P":1e15}

X1 = [] Y1 = [] X2 = [] Y2 = []

for line in fid:

   lineno+=1
   if lineno==0:
       continue
   
   x = line.split("\t")
   a = x[0]
   y = x[1].split("\xc2\xa0")
   if len(y) != 2:
       y = x[1].split(" ")
   b = y[0]
   c = y[1]

   try:
       a = float(a)
       lastThing = a
   except:
       pass

   b = float(b)
   d = sizedic[c.strip()[0]]

   print lastThing,":",b,"x",d

   if c.strip().endswith("FLOPS"):
       X1.append(lastThing)
       Y1.append(b*d)
   else:
       X2.append(lastThing)
       Y2.append(b*d)

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt plt.semilogy(X1,Y1) plt.semilogy(X2,Y2) plt.legend(["FLOPS","OPS"],"upper left") plt.xlabel("Year") plt.ylabel("Rmax")