UNIVAC I vs. The K Supercomputer
The UNIVAC I, created in the year 1951, was the first commercial computer in the US. Designed by Eckert and Mauchly, it was the magic wand of its times with a speed of almost 2000 operations per second. The magic machine required a mere room for its stage.
It used magnetic tapes and, like a solitary lion, abandoned the Godly punch cards. The only way to use punch cards with the UNIVAC was to first convert it into a magnetic tape.
One of UNIVAC’s exciting use was making statistical predictions. While the pollsters favored Stevenson, the UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower as the 34th President of America. Apart from the pollsters, the makers of the machine couldn’t trust UNIVAC at the time either; they pretended it was not working. But to their surprise, UNIVAC was right all along!
Without the UNIVAC, the US census calculations would have taken about 10 years making the whole point of conducting a census irrelevant. But thanks to the UNIVAC, their bu**s were saved!
Fast forward to 2017, we now have the K. One of the fastest supercomputers in existence. But how good is the K compared to our UNIVAC? Unbelievably good!
The K is a monster! This Japanese ninja can tear apart the delicate UNIVAC into pieces smaller than its constituent atoms.
Launched in 2011, the K is six decades ahead of the UNIVAC.
UNIVAC’s 2000 operations per second seems laughable compared to the K’s 10 petaflops. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second. A petaflop is 10¹⁵ operations. The K can perform 10¹⁵ operations ten times in a second.
It is difficult to appreciate this speed. If we fed the UNIVAC just one petaflop of instructions, how much time do you think it will take to complete?
No. of operations to do = 10¹⁵
Speed = 2000 = 2 * 10³ operations per second
Seconds required = 10¹⁵ / (2 * 10³) = 5 * 10¹¹ seconds
How much is that? 15855 years!!! About 159 centuries. The K does the same thing in one-tenth of a second. Is your mind blown yet?
Let’s do some calculations based on Moore’s Law to benchmark the development of computing power since 1950.
According to the Moore’s law, every two years the computing power should double. Since 1950, it has been almost 70 years. Divide that by two, and there have been 35 two-years. According to Moore’s Law, the computing power today should be 6.87 * 10¹³ (UNIVAC’s 2000 * 2³⁵) operations per second.
Compared to the K’s speed, a computer following Moore’s Law perfectly would be about 146 times slower.
If you liked this post, be sure to appreciate it clicking on the clap button as many times as you want.
And as always, thanks for reading. This is Abhishek Kumar and we will see each other again!
