The IBM 7030 was built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in 1955 had requested a computer 100 times faster than any existing computer.
They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades the fastest were made by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram.
In June 2018, all combined supercomputers on the list broke the 1 exaFLOPS mark. ==History== In 1960 UNIVAC built the Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC), today considered among the first supercomputers, for the US Navy Research and Development Center.
Customers in England and France also bought the computer, and it became the basis for the IBM 7950 Harvest, a supercomputer built for cryptanalysis. The third pioneering supercomputer project in the early 1960s was the Atlas at the University of Manchester, built by a team led by Tom Kilburn.
The IBM 7030 was completed in 1961 and despite not meeting the challenge of a hundredfold increase in performance, it was purchased by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and the Manchester University and was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. The CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray, was finished in 1964 and marked the transition from germanium to silicon transistors.
The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray-1's peak of 250 MFLOPS.
In the 1970s, vector processors operating on large arrays of data came to dominate.
It performed at 1.9 gigaFLOPS and was the world's second fastest after M-13 supercomputer in Moscow. ===Massively parallel designs=== The only computer to seriously challenge the Cray-1's performance in the 1970s was the ILLIAC IV.
The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray-1's peak of 250 MFLOPS.
Given that the 6600 outperformed all the other contemporary computers by about 10 times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market, when one hundred computers were sold at $8 million each. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, Cray Research.
A notable example is the highly successful Cray-1 of 1976.
Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, which became one of the most successful supercomputers in history.
Japan made major strides in the field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in the field.
Cray argued against this, famously quipping that "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" But by the early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably the Connection Machine (CM) that developed from research at MIT.
Several updated versions followed; the CM-5 supercomputer is a massively parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second. In 1982, Osaka University's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used a massively parallel processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors, including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors.
The Cray-2 was released in 1985.
Vector computers remained the dominant design into the 1990s.
In the mid 1990s a top 10 supercomputer required in the range of 100 kilowatts, in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required between 1 and 2 megawatts.
In the mid 1990s a top 10 supercomputer cost about 10 million Euros, while in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required an investment of between 40 and 50 million Euros.
Fujitsu's VPP500 from 1992 is unusual since, to achieve higher speeds, its processors used GaAs, a material normally reserved for microwave applications due to its toxicity.
The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993.
Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7 gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) per processor.
The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network.
The Internet PrimeNet Server supports GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest and most successful grid computing projects, since 1997. ===Quasi-opportunistic approaches=== Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing is a form of distributed computing whereby the "super virtual computer" of many networked geographically disperse computers performs computing tasks that demand huge processing power.
In the 2000s national governments put in place different strategies to fund supercomputers.
Based on the energy consumption of the Green 500 list of supercomputers between 2007 and 2011, a supercomputer with 1 exaflops in 2011 would have required nearly 500 megawatts.
In 2008, Roadrunner by IBM operated at 3.76 MFLOPS/W.
These computers run for tens of hours using multiple paralleled running CPU's to model different processes. ==Development and trends== In the 2010s, China, the United States, the European Union, and others competed to be the first to create a 1 exaFLOP (1018 or one quintillion FLOPS) supercomputer.
In the mid 1990s a top 10 supercomputer required in the range of 100 kilowatts, in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required between 1 and 2 megawatts.
A 2010 study commissioned by DARPA identified power consumption as the most pervasive challenge in achieving Exascale computing.
In the mid 1990s a top 10 supercomputer cost about 10 million Euros, while in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required an investment of between 40 and 50 million Euros.
However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company. In the Blue Gene system, IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density. The IBM Power 775, released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling.
Based on the energy consumption of the Green 500 list of supercomputers between 2007 and 2011, a supercomputer with 1 exaflops in 2011 would have required nearly 500 megawatts.
However, GPUs are gaining ground and in 2012 the Jaguar supercomputer was transformed into Titan by retrofitting CPUs with GPUs. High-performance computers have an expected life cycle of about three years before requiring an upgrade.
Much research is currently being done to overcome these challenges and make HPC in the cloud a more realistic possibility. In 2016 Penguin Computing, R-HPC, Amazon Web Services, Univa, Silicon Graphics International, Sabalcore, and Gomput started to offer HPC cloud computing.
Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).
Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.
In June 2018, all combined supercomputers on the list broke the 1 exaFLOPS mark. ==History== In 1960 UNIVAC built the Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC), today considered among the first supercomputers, for the US Navy Research and Development Center.
In 2018, Lenovo became the world's largest provider for the TOP500 supercomputers with 117 units produced. ==Applications== The stages of supercomputer application may be summarized in the following table: The IBM Blue Gene/P computer has been used to simulate a number of artificial neurons equivalent to approximately one percent of a human cerebral cortex, containing 1.6 billion neurons with approximately 9 trillion connections.
As of June 2020, the fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list is Fugaku, in Japan, with a LINPACK benchmark score of 415 PFLOPS, followed by Summit, by around 266.7 PFLOPS.
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