CDC 6600

CDC 6x00 registers

⁵₉	. . .	¹₇	. . .	⁰₀	(bit position)
Operand registers (60 bits)
X0					Register 0
X1					Register 1
X2					Register 2
X3					Register 3
X4					Register 4
X5					Register 5
X6					Register 6
X7					Register 7
Address registers (18 bits)
		A0			Address 0
		A1			Address 1
		A2			Address 2
		A3			Address 3
		A4			Address 4
		A5			Address 5
		A6			Address 6
		A7			Address 7
Increment registers (18 bits)
		B0 (all bits zero)			Increment 0
		B1			Increment 1
		B2			Increment 2
		B3			Increment 3
		B4			Increment 4
		B5			Increment 5
		B6			Increment 6
		B7			Increment 7

The CDC 6600 was the flagship mainframe supercomputer of the 6000 series of computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. The first CDC 6600 was delivered in 1965 to the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, where it was used to analyse the two to three million photographs of bubble-chamber tracks that CERN experiments were producing every year. In 1966 another CDC 6600 was delivered to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, part of the University of California at Berkeley, where it was used for the analysis of nuclear events photographed inside the Alvarez bubble chamber; for cooling efficiency. The University of Texas at Austin had one delivered and installed underground on its main campus, tucked into a hillside with one side exposed, for its Computer Science and Mathematics Departments. The CDC 6600 is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, the IBM 7030 Stretch, roughly by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.

A CDC 6600 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

CDC's first products were based on the machines designed at ERA, which Seymour Cray had been asked to update after moving to CDC. After an experimental machine known as the Little Character, they delivered the CDC 1604, one of the first commercial transistor-based computers, and one of the fastest machines on the market. Management was delighted, and made plans for a new series of machines that were more tailored to business use; they would include instructions for character handling and record keeping for instance. Cray was not interested in such a project, and set himself the goal of producing a new machine that would be 50 times faster than the 1604. When asked to complete a detailed report on plans at one and five years into the future, he wrote back that his five-year goal was "to produce the largest computer in the world", "largest" at that time being synonymous with "fastest", and that his one-year plan was "to be one-fifth of the way".

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Wikipedia