History of supercomputing
The term "Super Computing" was first used in the New York World in 1929[7] to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University.
[19] 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.
It introduced a number of innovations, such as chaining, in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results that can be used immediately, without additional memory references which would otherwise reduce computational speed.
[10][23] 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.
[23] By 1983 Cray and Control Data were supercomputer leaders; despite its lead in the overall computer market, IBM was unable to produce a profitable competitor.
[24] 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.
[26] That trend was partly responsible for a move away from the in-house, Cray Operating System to UNICOS based on Unix.
Seymour Cray began to work on a massively parallel computer in the early 1990s, but died in a car accident in 1996 before it could be completed.
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.
[29][30] 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.
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.
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.
[38] 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.
Finally, starting in 2022 and until the present (as of December 2023[update]), 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.
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.
