History of supercomputing

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. with the system console 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. In 1968, Cray completed the CDC 7600, again the fastest computer in the world. 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 nearly three years before the Cray CDC 6600 supercomputer was 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==

-cooled Cray-2 supercomputer Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, and it became the most successful supercomputer in history. The Cray X-MP (designed by Steve Chen) was released in 1982 as a 105 MHz shared-memory parallel vector processor with better chaining support and multiple memory pipelines. All three floating-point pipelines on the X-MP could operate simultaneously. The Cray-2, released in 1985, was a four-processor liquid cooled computer totally immersed in a tank of Fluorinert, which bubbled as it operated. The Cray-2 was a totally new design. It did not use chaining and had a high memory latency, but used much pipelining and was ideal for problems that required large amounts of memory. That trend was partly responsible for a move away from the in-house, Cray Operating System to UNICOS based on Unix. ==Massive processing: the 1990s==

The Cray-2 which set the frontiers of supercomputing in the mid to late 1980s had only 8 processors. In the 1990s, supercomputers with thousands of processors began to appear. Another development at the end of the 1980s was the arrival of Japanese supercomputers, some of which were modeled after the Cray-1. During the first half of the Strategic Computing Initiative, some massively parallel architectures were proven to work, such as the WARP systolic array, message-passing MIMD like the Cosmic Cube hypercube, SIMD like the Connection Machine, etc. In 1987, a TeraOPS Computing Technology Program was proposed, with a goal of achieving 1 teraOPS (a trillion operations per second) by 1992, which was considered achievable by scaling up any of the previously proven architectures. cabinet showing the bus bars and mesh routers The SX-3/44R was announced by NEC Corporation in 1989 and a year later earned the fastest-in-the-world title with a four-processor model. However, Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994. It had a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2,048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network. In the same timeframe the Intel Paragon could have 1,000 to 4,000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two-dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes; communicating via the Message Passing Interface. By 1995, Cray was also shipping massively parallel systems, e.g. the Cray T3E with over 2,000 processors, using a three-dimensional torus interconnect. The Paragon architecture soon led to the Intel ASCI Red supercomputer in the United States, which held the top supercomputing spot to the end of the 20th century as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative. This was also a mesh-based MIMD massively-parallel system with over 9,000 compute nodes and well over 12 terabytes of disk storage, but used off-the-shelf Pentium Pro processors that could be found in everyday personal computers. ASCI Red was the first system ever to break through the 1 teraflop barrier on the MP-Linpack benchmark in 1996; eventually reaching 2 teraflops. ==Petascale computing in the 21st century==

/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory Significant progress was made in the first decade of the 21st century. The efficiency of supercomputers continued to increase, but not dramatically so. The Cray C90 used 500 kilowatts of power in 1991, while by 2003 the ASCI Q used 3,000 kW while being 2,000 times faster, increasing the performance per watt 300 fold. In 2004, the Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) reached 35.9 teraflops, using 640 nodes, each with eight proprietary vector processors. The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer architecture found widespread use in the early part of the 21st century, and 27 of the computers on the TOP500 list used that architecture. The Blue Gene approach is somewhat different in that it trades processor speed for low power consumption so that a larger number of processors can be used at air cooled temperatures. It can use over 60,000 processors, with 2048 processors "per rack", and connects them via a three-dimensional torus interconnect. Progress in China has been rapid, in that China placed 51st on the TOP500 list in June 2003; this was followed by 14th in November 2003, 10th in June 2004, then 5th during 2005, before gaining the top spot in 2010 with the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-I supercomputer. In July 2011, the 8.1 petaflop Japanese K computer became the fastest in the world, using over 60,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that the K computer is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world seven years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide. By 2014, the Earth Simulator had dropped off the list and by 2018 the K computer had dropped out of the top 10. By 2018, Summit had become the world's most powerful supercomputer, at 200 petaFLOPS. In 2020, the Japanese once again took the top spot with the Fugaku supercomputer, capable of 442 PFLOPS. Finally, starting in 2022 and until the present (), the world's fastest supercomputer had become the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, also known as the OLCF-5 and hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States. The Frontier is based on the Cray EX, is the world's first exascale supercomputer, and uses only AMD CPUs and GPUs; it achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second. ==Historical TOP500 table==

This is a list of the computers which appeared at the top of the TOP500 list since 1993. The "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. ==Export controls==

The CoCom and its later replacement, the Wassenaar Arrangement, legally regulated, i.e. required licensing and approval and record-keeping; or banned entirely, the export of high-performance computers (HPCs) to certain countries. Such controls have become harder to justify, leading to loosening of these regulations. Some have argued these regulations were never justified. ==See also==