Writing today about desktop supercomputers and looking back to the systems of the last century, when a teraflop used to be fast.

Desktop supercomputers don’t approach the speeds of high-performance systems — even the least powerful supercomputer in the Top 500 list is many times faster than any desktop supercomputer.

The first supercomputer capable of teraflop performance (able to perform a trillion floating point operations per second) was the Cray T3E-1200E, in 1998. It took desktop supercomputers about a decade longer to attain that speed. However, teraflop systems of the late 1990s couldn’t quite fit on a desktop — they had a footprint the size of a room.

Anyway, now high-performance supercomputers have broken the petaflop barrier. And people are talking about mobile phone supercomputing. Yup, we’re living in the future.