February 15, 2021 is ENIAC's 75th Anniversary. Sign up for Virtual events!

Blow Your Mind - Compare ENIAC to Today's Supercomputers!

How many ENIAC computers would be equal to one modern IBM Supercomputer?

ENIAC had a clock frequency of 5000 Hz. For the most basic instructions (add/subtract values, load value, save value, etc.), the ENIAC could finish one instruction per clock cycle. More complicated instructions (accumulation, multiplication, division, etc.) would need multiple cycles.

ENIAC was fast!

ENIAC was estimated with a performance of 0.00289 MIPS (million instructions per second). You might've heard of flops (floating point operations per second), which is a more reasonable metric for performance, but is not always available for older computers. The ENIAC was weird in that it directly stored decimal digits instead of binary numbers the way it's done today, so getting a performance number isn't one to one. However, these were decimal numbers with 10 digits stored, so we can say that the ENIAC would be doing basically one flop per instruction (or 0.00289 megaflops).

But how fast was ENIAC?

The number one fastest public known supercomputer is IBM's Summit Computer in Oak Ridge, Tennessee with a theoretical peak performance of 200,000 teraflops. Thus 200,000 teraflops divided by 0.00289 megaflops is equal to 6.9204 * 10^13 or about 69 trillion ENIACS to match IBM's Summit SuperComputer! Really? Sixty Nine Trillion ENIACS!

We found this answer on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/crbgw0/request_how_many_eniac_computers_would_it_take_to/

About the 50th Anniversary

You Can't Start a Fire without A Spark!

Vice President Al Gore looked at the future of technology in his keynote address at the 50th Anniversary of ENIAC in 1996. If there, you might have heard The Penn Band struck up "You Can Call Me Al," as Vice President Gore entered a filled-to-capacity Irvine Auditorium. After citing lyrics from Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" and playing a musical valentine card for his wife, Gore identified the crux of his speech ... you need a spark. His 40-minute talk focused on the federal government's commitment to furthering science and technological research. " 'You can't start a fire without a spark,' " Gore quoted. "The federal government provided the initial spark that eventually flickered into extraordinary products." You can read this timeless message here: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lazowska/faculty.lecture/innovation/gore.html