| Period | Supercomputer | Peak speed | Location |
| 1943-1944 | Colossus | 5000 characters per second | Bletchley Park, England |
| 1945-1950 | Manchester Mark I | 500 instructions per second | University of Manchester,England |
| 1950-1955 | MIT Whirlwind | 20 KIPS (CRT) 40 KIPS (Core) | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA |
| 1956-1958 | IBM 704 | 40 KIPS 12 kiloflops |
| 1958-1959 | IBM 709 | 40 KIPS 12 kiloflops |
| 1959-1960 | IBM 7090 | 210 kiloflops | U.S. Air Force BMEWS (RADC), Rome, NY |
| 1960-1961 |
LARC |
500 kiloflops (2 CPUs) | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California |
| 1961-1964 |
IBM 7030 "Stretch" |
1.2 MIPS
~600 kiloflops | Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico |
| 1965-1969 |
CDC 6600 |
10 MIPS
3 megaflops | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California |
| 1969-1975 |
CDC 7600 |
36 megaflops | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California |
| 1974-1975 |
CDC Star-100 |
100 megaflops (vector),
~2 megaflops (scalar) | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California |
| 1975-1983 |
Cray-1 |
80 megaflops (vector),
72 megaflops (scalar) | Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico
(1976) |
| 1975-1982 |
ILLIAC IV |
150 megaflops,
<100 megaflops (average) | NASA Ames Research Center, California
Had serious reliability problems. |
| 1981-1983 |
CDC Cyber-205 |
400 megaflops (vector),
average much lower. |
| 1983-1985 |
Cray X-MP |
500 megaflops (4 CPUs) | Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico |
| 1985-1990 |
Cray-2 |
1.95 gigaflops (4 CPUs)
3.9 gigaflops (8 CPUs) | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and NASA
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (the only 8 CPU system) |
| 1989-1990 |
ETA-10G |
10.3 gigaflops (vector) (8 CPUs),
average much lower. |
| 1990-1995 |
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel |
236 gigaflops | National Aerospace Lab |
| 1995-2000 |
Intel ASCI Red |
2.15 teraflops | Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico |
| 2000-2002 |
IBM ASCI White, SP Power3 375 MHz | 7.226 teraflops | Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, California |
| 2002-2004 |
Earth Simulator |
35.86 teraflops | Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, Japan |
| 2004- |
Blue Gene/L prototype |
36.01 teraflops | IBM, Rochester, Minnesota |
| 2004 - |
NASA Project Columbia |
42.7 teraflops (initial tests) | NASAfuture |
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