The IBM Roadrunner is a supercomputer built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the world’s second fastest supercomputer and the first supercomputer to boast petaflop performance. A unique system built with off the shelf parts, it achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25th, 2008. Costing $133 million, it’s also…
The da Vinci Surgical System was approved by the U.S. FDA in 2000 and was the product of development and research in the late 1980s by SRI International. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health provided funding and a prototype robotic surgical system was created. This caught the attention of…
The IBM System/38 was part of the Future Systems Project at IBM, and was developed by Dr.Frank Soltis under the codename “Pacific”. It was released to the public in August, 1979 and featured one of the first relational database management systems using SQL, System R, also developed by the company….
Blue Gene/L, IBM’s newest supercomputer based off the original Blue Gene project, took the title of world’s fastest supercomputer from the Earth Simulator System in Nov of 2004. With a sustained performance of 70.72 teraflops it will be used for numerous applications and high performance computing. It has also spawned…
From an Apple press release: CUPERTINO, California—August 18, 2003—Apple today announced that it has begun shipping the two single processor models of its Power Mac® G5, the world’s fastest personal computer featuring the first 64-bit desktop processor and the industry’s first 1 GHz front-side bus. The dual 2.0 GHz Power…
From an NEC press release: NEC Corporation today announced the completion of its delivery of the ultra high-speed vector parallel computing system known as “the Earth Simulator,” to the Earth Simulator Center. The system is slated to begin operation on March 11, 2002. The Earth Simulator was developed by the…
The UNIVAC I was the world’s first commercially available computer. The first UNIVAC I was delivered on June 14, 1951. From 1951 to 1958 a total of 46 UNIVAC I computers were delivered, all of which have since been phased out. In 1947, John Mauchly chose the name “UNIVAC” (Universal…
On December 6, IBM announced a new $100 million exploratory research initiative to build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers. The new computer — nicknamed “Blue Gene” by IBM researchers — was capable of more than one quadrillion operations per second (one petaflop). This level…
Deep Blue is at heart a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP-based computer system that was designed to play chess at the grandmaster level. In May 1997, the IBM supercomputer played a fascinating match with the reigning World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov. From IBMs “Deep Blue”: In 1985, a Carnegie Mellon doctoral…
In 1988, Cray Research introduced the Cray Y-MP®, the world’s first supercomputer to sustain over 1 gigaflop on many applications. Multiple 333 MFLOPS processors powered the system to a record sustained speed of 2.3 gigaflops. Supercomputers are the fastest type of computer. Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for…