The original supercomputer, the Cray-1, was set up at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976.
The Cray-1 was capable of 80 MFLOPS (or, according to another source, 138 - 250 MFLOPS).

Wiki Note: FLOPS is an acronym meaning ''FLoating point Operations Per Second''.
It is a measure of a computer's performance.
A couple of things to keep in mind when talking FLOPS though.
Often its theoretical speeds on paper, not what is necessarily done in the ''real'' world.
System buses, RAM type, and I/O speeds, etc. all effect the overall system performance.
Performance-per-watt and MIPS should also be considered. etc.
Nevertheless, I imagine a FLOPS measurement gives some idea on how powerful a computer is?
Something to compare computers with?

The Cray - 1 was of course for years and years (if not still today) the best known and most successful supercomputer in history.
I still have conversations today, where we say something along the lines of: ''Well, well, very good, but still not a Cray computer ...''
Well, how good was the 80 MHz Cray - 1 actually? Configured with 1 million words of RAM and all.
That thing that weighed 5.5 tons, including the freon refrigeration system?
That thing, where the machine and its power supplies consumed about 115 kW of power;
cooling and storage doubling the figure ...

After the wonderful experience of actually seeing a Cray 1 in the Museum. Breathing in the ultimate, uber cool computer of all times ...
(Back home) I decided to run some statistics on my office PC. Just to compare.
I do realize that it is as fair as comparing apples and oranges, but still kind of shocking to see how a measly office computer of 2009 compares
with the uber computer of all times...

I downloaded CPUBench and ran it on my office computer to get some values.

And the measly office PC wins the day ...

Back in the 80s me and my friends were of course convinced that the CRAY 1 computer was just awesome and uber cool like nothing else.
And pretty close to being comparable to a human brain.

Well, how wrong we were...
Sure, there is no real consensus regarding the computational power of the human brain.
However, some estimates of the brain's processing power put it at around 100 trillion neuron updates per second.
Where it is expected that the first unoptimized simulations of a human brain in real time will
require a computer capable of 10^18 FLOPS (1 exa FLOPS= 1000 Peta FLOPS = 1000.000 Tera FLOPS = 1000.000.000 GFLOPS).
Because, according to these estimates, the brain should be capable of 100 petaflops.
Lets just say its a lot more than the Cray....

Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University started by estimating the human brain to be doing a 100 million MIPS.
Then Nick Bostrom of Yale estimated it to be 1,000 times higher than Moravecs estimate.
And recently Kurzweil have estimated the computing capacity required for a human brain functional simulation to
be in the 10^15 - 10^16 FLOPS range (chart).
Full brain simulations to be reached by super computers in the 2020s (Singularity is near), perhaps earlier,
according to Kurzweils predictions in the singularity book.

The race is on. Japanese politicians have decided to fund the construction of a 10 petaflop computer system by 2011.
Contrast that with IBMs private partnership with a Swiss Institute, to emulate the activity of brain neurons. Appropriately called Blue Brain.
Currently reaching sustained speeds of 500 Tera FLOPS (Blue Gene).

The latest Cray machine - the Cray XT5 - is doing 1.3 petaflops (Nov. 2008).
And the fastest (Oct. 2009) super computer now is the IBM road runner at 1.7 Peta FLOPS.
Busy modelling the decay of the US nuclear arsenal.
Perhaps a more reasonable thing to do than Mind Uploading?

October 2009

www.simonlaub.net

Pics from visit to the Computer Museum, Mountain View, CA. - Visible Storage display items.
And my own graphs of course ..