Speedy suanpan

The first suanpan, calculating pan or Chinese abacus, was mentioned in second century BC scrolls and would have been in use for many years prior to this. The current Sunway Taihu Light supercomputer can perform 93 million billion calculations per second (93 petaflops) and heads the latest Top 500 list of supercomputer performance. A machine with ten times this speed is at the prototype stage.