History of supercomputing: Difference between revisions

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

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.<ref name=chen /> The [[CDC 6600]], released in 1964, is generally 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),<ref>David Lundstrom, ''A Few Good Men from UNIVAC'', page 90, lists LARC and STRETCH as supercomputers.</ref> and the [[Manchester computers|Manchester]] [[Atlas (computer)|Atlas]] (1962), all{{Specify|date=January 2024|reason=the NORC certainly wasn't}} of which were of comparable power.{{Citation needed|date=February 2024}}

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.