Fun Facts... The cost of computing...

[marshall_mosty]

I ran across an interesting packet at my grandparents house a few weeks back. My grandfather worked for Sun Oil Co. for 30+ years and when he retired in 1984, there was a dedication of the “Sun Technology Center” in Richardson, TX.

This $36 million facility is the latest example of Sun Company’s commitment to leadership in the worldwide energy business. Our new Technology Center provides an environmentally attractive and intellectually stimulating performance area for more than 200 engineers and scientists engaged in the engineering, geological, geophysical and computer science programs being conducted by Sun’s Dallas-based exploration and production subsidiary”.

Here is what was said about the computer system. State of the art for the time, but nothing compared to what our cell phones provide today. I’ve put some 1984 numbers next to current day to show how far we have come in a short 30 years…

From the “Building D, Computer Center” flyer…

Sun spends $6.4 million annually for scientific data processing. Three large computers, or “main frames,” are used by Sun for complex exploration and production processing. The most powerful of these is the Cray Research X-MP Model 14, used primarily for simulation of oil reservoirs and seismic exploration. The Cray X-MP’s speed is measured in millions of floating point operations per second (MFLOPS). A floating point operation is a cycle that consists of reading data from the computer’s memory, performing a calculation on the data (adding, multiplying, etc.), and saving the data again. The Cray X-MP can do this cycle 105 million times every second! Even with this tremendous speed, the computer may still take up to 30 hours to complete a simulation job – illustrating the complexity of the processing performed by Sun engineers.
Additionally, data must be read, stored and otherwised manipulated. To accomplisih this, the computer center uses tapes, disks, printers and plotters. Sun has 20,000 reels of tape stored onsite and disk storage capacity of 150 billion bits of information.

1984
Computer System
Cray X-MP Model 14
105 MHz
$42,780,000 per GFLOPS
$14,500,000/system

Storage
150GB
20,000 reels of tape
approx. cost $8,850,000,000


2015
Computer System
Celeron G1830 R9 295x2
11.5 TFLOPS
$0.08 per GFLOPS
$902/system
http://www.freezepage.com/1420850340WGSMHXRBLE

Storage
150GB hard drive
$15.99 (Amazon)
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SpinPo...0gb+hard+drive