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.[8] The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.[9][10]
Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company.[11] Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it became one of the most successful supercomputers in history.[12][13] The Cray-2 released in 1985 was an 8 processor liquid cooled computer andFluorinert was pumped through it as it operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest until 1990.[14]
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. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processor.[15][16] The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three dimensional crossbar network.[17][18][19] The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000Intel 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.[20]
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