I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

> The first benchmark I ran was my top500 High Performance Linpack cluster benchmark. This is my favorite cluster benchmark, because it's the traditional benchmark they'd run on massive supercomputers to get on the top500 supercomputer list. […]

> After fixing the thermals, the cluster did not throttle, and used around 130W. At full power, I got 325 Gflops

I was sort of surprised to find that the top500 list on their website only goes back to 1993. I was hoping to find some ancient 70’s version of the list where his ridiculous Pi cluster could sneak on. Oh well, might as well take a look… I’ll pull from the sub-lists of

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/

They give the top 10 immediately.

First list (June 1993):

     placement  name            RPEAK (GFlop/s)
     1          CM-5/1024       131.00
     10         Y-MP C916/16256 15.24

Last list he wins, I think (June 1996):

     1          SR2201/1024     307.20  
     10         SX-4/32         64.00

First list he’s bumped out of the top 10 (November 1997):

     1          ASCI Red        1,830.40
     10         T3E             326.40

I think he gets bumped off the full top500 list around 2002-2003. Unfortunately I made the mistake of going by Rpeak here, but they sort by Rmax, and I don’t want to go through the whole list.

Apologies for any transcription errors.

Actually, pretty good showing for such a silly cluster. I think I’ve been primed by stuff like “your watch has more compute power than the Apollo guidance computer” or whatever to expect this sort of thing to go way, way back, instead of just to the 90’s.