I was just scrolling through some old posts of mine and found this one from 2008 where I talk about the fastest supercomputer in the world at that time which was capable of 1.026 QIPS (quadrillion instructions per second aka 1 petaflop).

I predicted at the time that by 2012 we should have supercomputers running 16 QIPS / petaflops.

Well last year, 2014, China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer was performing at 33.86 petaflops – double the 2012 prediction, which is right on track.

My 2008 post posited that the human brain was only capable of 10 petaflops – and it that’s true, it means that Tianhe-2 is running at 3x the speed of a human brain. It’s ability to use that processing power (eg its software) may not yet be as sophisticated as ours – but how long before they catch up?