High Performance Computing Today

In last 50 years, the field of scientific computing has seen a rapid change of vendors, architectures, technologies and the usage of systems. Despite all these changes the evolution of performance on a large scale however seems to be a very steady and continuous process. Moore's Law is often cited in this context. If the authors plot the peak performance of various computers of the last 5 decades in Figure 1 that could have been called the supercomputers of their time they indeed see how well this law holds for almost the complete lifespan of modern computing. On average they see an increase in performance of two magnitudes of order every decade