History of supercomputing

A Cray-1 supercomputer preserved at the Deutsches Museum

The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance.[1] The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.[2][3] However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s,[4] and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960),[5] the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962),[6] and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all[specify] of which were of comparable power.[citation needed]

While the supercomputers of the 1980s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear both in the United States and in Japan, setting new computational performance records.

By the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors similar to those found in personal computers were constructed and broke through the teraFLOPS computational barrier.

Progress in the first decade of the 21st century was dramatic and supercomputers with over 60,000 processors appeared, reaching petaFLOPS performance levels.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference chen was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Impagliazzo, John; Lee, John A. N. (2004). History of computing in education. Springer. p. 172. ISBN 1-4020-8135-9. Retrieved 20 February 2018.
  3. ^ Sisson, Richard; Zacher, Christian K. (2006). The American Midwest: an interpretive encyclopedia. Indiana University Press. p. 1489. ISBN 0-253-34886-2.
  4. ^ Frank da Cruz (25 October 2013) [2004]. "IBM NORC". Retrieved 20 February 2018.
  5. ^ Lundstrom, David E. (1984). A Few Good Men from UNIVAC. MIT Press. ISBN 9780735100107. Retrieved 20 February 2018.
  6. ^ David Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from UNIVAC, page 90, lists LARC and STRETCH as supercomputers.