News-Gazette (March 3) -- Today's laptop can perform 80 billion operations per second — 80 gigaflops in technical terms. That's 164 times the power of the first Cray XMP supercomputer used at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications when it opened in 1986. The center is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a series of talks, seminars, open houses, an exhibit at the University of Illinois Spurlock Museum, and other events showcasing its achievements.