Ray Kurzweil

By 2009 supercomputers will reach at least 20 petaflops, matching the hardware capacity of the human brain.

“Supercomputers match at least the hardware capacity of the human brain … 20 million billion calculations per second (20 petaflops).”

Said on

1 January 1999 · Prediction for 2009 from The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), as quoted by Kurzweil in his 2010 self-review "How My Predictions Are Faring".

Source

How My Predictions Are Faring (October 2010) · The Kurzweil Library

Should come true

2009

How sure they sounded

none (stated as fact about 2009)

Categories

Technology

Importance

3 of 5 · A milestone for the supercomputing industry and scientific computing.

Outcome

Right, but late Happened 17 June 2013.

The fastest supercomputer in November 2009 (Jaguar) reached about 1.76 petaflop/s Rmax (2.33 peak), more than 10x short of 20 petaflops. The first system above 20 petaflops Rmax was Tianhe-2 in June 2013 (33.86 PF), so the milestone came about 3.5 years late.

Evidence:

• https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2009/11/
• https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2013/06/