History of supercomputing: Difference between revisions

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{{use American English|date=December 2022}}

[[Image:Cray-1-deutsches-museum.jpg|thumb|A [[Cray-1]] supercomputer preserved at the [[Deutsches Museum]]]]

The term '''supercomputing''' arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at [[Columbia University]].{{Citation needed|date=December 2023}} The [[CDC 6600]], released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer.<ref>{{cite book | title= History of computing in education | first1= John | last1= Impagliazzo | first2= John A. N. | last2= Lee | year= 2004 | isbn = 1-4020-8135-9 | page = 172 | publisher= Springer |url =https://books.google.com/books?id=SzTTBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA172 | access-date= 20 February 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title= The American Midwest: an interpretive encyclopedia |first1= Richard |last1= Sisson |first2=Christian K. |last2= Zacher | year = 2006 | isbn = 0-253-34886-2 | page = 1489 |publisher= Indiana University Press | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=n3Xn7jMx1RYC&pg=PA1489 }}</ref> However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 [[IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator|IBM NORC]] in the 1950s,<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/norc.html | title = IBM NORC | author = Frank da Cruz | orig-year = 2004 | date = 25 October 2013 | access-date = 20 February 2018}}</ref> and in the early 1960s, the [[UNIVAC LARC]] (1960),<ref>{{cite book | first1=David E. | last1=Lundstrom | title=A Few Good Men from UNIVAC | publisher=MIT Press | year=1984 | isbn=9780735100107 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CK4LAAAACAAJ | access-date=20 February 2018}}</ref> the [[IBM 7030 Stretch]] (1962), and the [[Manchester computers|Manchester]] [[Atlas (computer)|Atlas]] (1962), all of which were of comparable power.<ref>David Lundstrom, ''A Few Good Men from UNIVAC'', page 90, lists LARC and STRETCH as supercomputers.</ref>

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.

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==Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s==

The term "Super Computing" was first used in the ''[[New York World]]'' in 1929 to refer to large custom-built [[tabulating machine|tabulator]]s that [[IBM]] had made for [[Columbia University]].{{Citation needed|date=December 2023}}

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.<ref name=chen >{{cite book | title = Hardware software co-design of a multimedia SOC platform | first1 = Sao-Jie | last1 = Chen | first2 = Guang-Huei | last2 = Lin | first3 = Pao-Ann | last3 = Hsiung | first4 = Yu-Hen | last4 = Hu | year = 2009 | isbn = 9781402096235 | pages = 70–72 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=OXyo3om9ZOkC&pg=PA70 | publisher = [[Springer Science+Business Media]] | access-date = 20 February 2018}}</ref> In 1960, Cray completed the [[CDC 1604]], one of the first generation of commercially successful [[Transistor computer|transistorized]] computers and at the time of its release, the fastest computer in the world.<ref name=Hannan >{{cite book | title = Wisconsin Biographical Dictionary | first = Caryn | last = Hannan | year = 2008 | isbn = 978-1-878592-63-7 | pages = 83–84 | publisher = State History Publications | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=V08bjkJeXkAC&pg=PA83 | access-date = 20 February 2018}}</ref> However, the sole fully transistorized [[Harwell CADET]] was operational in 1951, and IBM delivered its commercially successful transistorized [[IBM 7090]] in 1959.