Supercomputer trend data

Karl Rupp has a nice blog series chronicling the developments in microprocessors over the past 42 years. He took the data originally compiled by M. Horowitz, F. Labonte, O. Shacham, K. Olukotun, L. Hammond, and C. Batten. I wanted to compare this data with parallel developments in supercomputing. So I noted down the number of cores in the #1 supercomputer of the Top500 going back to June 1993. The top machine at that time was Thinking Machines Corporation’s CM-5.

In only 21 years, we’ve gone from the top machine having 140 cores (the Numerical Wind Tunnel) to having 10.6 million (Sunway TaihuLight).

I’ve posted this additional data as a fork to Karl’s repository here. That includes the plot above and the Python script for creating it.