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. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC and 1955 AN/FSQ-7 vacuum tube computers in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power. 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.
Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s
The term "super computing" was first used in the New York World in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University. There were several lines of second-generation computers that were substantially faster than most contemporary mainframes. These included:
Atlas UNIVAC LARC IBM 7030 IBM 360/91 IBM 360/95 CDC 6600 The second generation saw the introduction of features intended to support multiprogramming and multiprocessor configurations, including master/slave (supervisor/problem) mode, storage protection keys, limit registers, protection associated with address translation, and atomic instructions. In 1957, a group of engineers left Sperry Corporation to form Control Data Corporation (CDC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Seymour Cray left Sperry a year later to join his colleagues at CDC. In 1960, Cray completed the CDC 1604, one of the first generation of commercially successful transistorized computers and at the time of its release, the fastest computer in the world. However, the sole fully transistorized Harwell CADET was operational in 1951, and IBM delivered its commercially successful transistorized IBM 7090 in 1959.
Around 1960, Cray decided to design a computer that would be the fastest in the world by a large margin. After four years of experimentation along with Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush and about 30 other engineers, Cray completed the CDC 6600 in 1964. Cray switched from germanium to silicon transistors, built by Fairchild Semiconductor, that used the planar process. These did not have the drawbacks of the mesa silicon transistors. He ran them very fast, and the speed of light restriction forced a very compact design with severe overheating problems, which were solved by introducing refrigeration, designed by Dean Roush. The 6600 outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market when two hundred computers were sold at $9 million each. The 6600 gained speed by "farming out" work to peripheral computing elements, freeing the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to process actual data. The Minnesota FORTRAN compiler for the machine was developed by Liddiard and Mundstock at the University of Minnesota and with it the 6600 could sustain 500 kiloflops on standard mathematical operations. In 1968, Cray completed the CDC 7600, again the fastest computer in the world. At 36 MHz, the 7600 had 3.6 times the clock speed of the 6600, but ran significantly faster due to other technical innovations. They sold only about 50 of the 7600s, not quite a failure. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company. Two years after his departure CDC delivered the STAR-100, which at 100 megaflops was three times the speed of the 7600. Along with the Texas Instruments ASC, the STAR-100 was one of the first machines to use vector processing—the idea having been inspired around 1964 by the APL programming language.
In 1956, a team at Manchester University in the United Kingdom began development of MUSE—a name derived from microsecond engine—with the aim of eventually building a computer that could operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. Mu (the name of the Greek letter μ) is a prefix in the SI and other systems of units denoting a factor of 10−6 (one millionth). At the end of 1958, Ferranti agreed to collaborate with Manchester University on the project, and the computer was shortly afterwards renamed Atlas, with the joint venture under the control of Tom Kilburn. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December 1962—nearly three years before the Cray CDC 6600 supercomputer was introduced—as one of the world's first supercomputers. It was considered at the time of its commissioning to be the most powerful computer in the world, equivalent to four IBM 7094s. It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. The Atlas pioneered virtual memory and paging as a way to extend its working memory by combining its 16,384 words of primary core memory with an additional 96K words of secondary drum memory. Atlas also pioneered the Atlas Supervisor, "considered by many to be the first recognizable modern operating system".
The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s
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