The Atlas was the first real supercomputer and was developed by Tom Kilburn and a team at Manchester University in England. A transistorized computer, it was the first to use virtual memory and pioneered paging. It was brought online on December 7th, 1962 as part of a joint project with…
This petascale supercomputer built by IBM was deployed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2012. It quickly replaced the K Computer as the world’s fastest, benchmarking 16 petaflops. Running entirely on Linux, it shattered records for highest sustained performance at 10 petaflops. For the first time, a model of…
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…
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 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…
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…
The Cray-2 vector supercomputer was released in 1985 and was the successor to the Cray XMP by Cray Research. At the time of its release it was the fastest computer in the world, bumping the XMP off the top spot. It was capable of 1.9 GFLOPS. The first Cray-2 had…
The Connection Machine was the first commercial computer designed expressly to work on simulating intelligence and life. A massively parallel supercomputer with 65,536 processors, it was the brainchild of Danny Hillis, conceived while he was a graduate student under Marvin Minsky at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. At it’s height,…