This virtual museum showcases nearly 40 years of supercomputers at EPCC, which hosts and manages ARCHER2 on behalf of UKRI, and how the technology has changed over time.
Some definitions before we start:
- Core (CPU core): the part of a processor that reads and executes computer code
- FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per second): a basic measure of computer performance, this tells you how much work a computer system does every second. A floating point operation (FLOP) is a mathematical operation based on decimal numbers
- Byte: a measure of data. The larger the number of bytes, the more information a computer can hold
When talking about bytes and FLOPS, the numbers can get very large. To make these large numbers simpler to understand, these prefixes are used in place of many zeros to represent the scale of these values:
| Prefix | Number | Bytes Unit | FLOPS Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kilo | 1,000 | KB | kFLOPS |
| Mega | 1,000,000 | MB | MFLOPS |
| Giga | 1,000,000,000 | GB | GFLOPS |
| Tera | 1,000,000,000,000 | TB | TFLOPS |
| Peta | 1,000,000,000,000,000 | PB | PFLOPS |
| Exa | 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 | EB | EFLOPS |
