Supercomputers for the masses
I have recently completed building a new computer for machine learning. The capabilities of computers available to hobbyists are amazing.
The metric by which scientific computers are measured is FLOPs — Floating point operations per second. The higher, the better. If the only metric is floating point arithmetic, the human brain has a few FLOPs. Taken as a whole, the human brain performs about 10 ^ 16 operations per second, very few of which are floating point.
Coming out of graduate school in 1972, I was manager of an engineering company’s Control Data Corporation 6400 Supercomputer. It had its own room with a glass-panel front wall, raised floor, conditioned power, dedicated air conditioner, and staff of two CDC technicians. At installation, its price was about $5 million (in 1972 dollars). It could execute about 200 kilo FLOPs — 200,000 floating point instructions per second — 2 * 10 ^ 5.
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