History of supercomputing

The history of supercomputing goes back to the early 1920s in the United States with the IBM tabulators at Columbia University and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC), 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.

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 teraflop computational barrier.

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

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.

In 1957 a group of engineers left Sperry Corporation to form Control Data Corporation (CDC) in Minneapolis, MN. Seymour Cray left Sperry a year later to join his colleagues at CDC. In 1960 Cray completed the CDC 1604, one of the first solid state computers, and the fastest computer in the world at a time when vacuum tubes were found in most large computers.

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. Given that the 6600 outran all computers of the time by about 10 times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market when one hundred computers were sold at $8 million each.

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