The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer company that in the 1960s was one of the nine major U.S. computer companies, which group included IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the N ...

(CDC) were designed by

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996)
– was an American

CDC 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the I ...

, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the

UNIVAC LARC The UNIVAC LARC, short for the ''Livermore Advanced Research Computer'', is a mainframe computer designed to a requirement published by Edward Teller in order to run hydrodynamic simulations for nuclear weapon design. It was one of the earliest s ...

(1960), the

IBM 7030 Stretch The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three tim ...

(1962), and the

Manchester Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...

Atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

(1962), all of which were of comparable power. 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. By the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors similar to those found in personal computers were constructed and broke through the teraFLOPS computational barrier. Progress in the first decade of the 21st century was dramatic and supercomputers with over 60,000 processors appeared, reaching petaFLOPS performance levels.

Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s

The term "Super Computing" was first used in the ''

New York World The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 to 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers as a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under publisher Jo ...

'' in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators that

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

had made for

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

. There were several lines of second generation computers that were substantially faster than most contemporary mainframes. These included *

IBM 7030 The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three t ...

* IBM 360/91 * IBM 360/95 *

The second generation saw the introduction of features intended to support

multiprogramming In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result ...

and

multiprocessor Multiprocessing (MP) is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. The ...

configurations, including master/slave (supervisor/problem) mode, storage protection keys, limit registers, protection associated with address translation, and atomic instructions. In 1957, a group of engineers left

Sperry Corporation Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the 20th century. Sperry ceased to exist in 1986 following a prolonged hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroughs ...

to form

(CDC) in

Minneapolis Minneapolis is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States, and its county seat. With a population of 429,954 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the state's List of cities in Minnesota, most populous city. Locat ...

, Minnesota.

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996)
– was an American

CDC 1604 The CDC 1604 is a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC). The 1604 is known as one of the first commercially successful transistorized computers. (The IBM 7090 was delivered ...

, one of the first generation of commercially successful

transistorized A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals f ...

computers and at the time of its release, the fastest computer in the world. However, the sole fully transistorized

Harwell CADET The Harwell CADET was the first fully transistorised computer in Europe, and may have been the first fully transistorised computer in the world. The electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, UK built the H ...

was operational in 1951, and IBM delivered its commercially successful transistorized

IBM 7090 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation Transistor computer, transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member o ...

in 1959.

Around 1960, Cray decided to design a computer that would be the fastest in the world by a large margin. After four years of experimentation along with Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush and about 30 other engineers, Cray completed the

in 1964. Cray switched from germanium to silicon transistors, built by

Fairchild Semiconductor Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument by the " traitorous eight" who defected from Shockley Semi ...

, that used the planar process. These did not have the drawbacks of the mesa silicon transistors. He ran them very fast, and the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant exactly equal to ). It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time i ...

restriction forced a very compact design with severe overheating problems, which were solved by introducing refrigeration, designed by Dean Roush. The 6600 outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the

, by a factor of three."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three times faster than the next fastest machine of its day, the IBM 7030 Stretch." With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, it was dubbed a ''supercomputer'' and defined the supercomputing market when two hundred computers were sold at $9 million each. The 6600 gained speed by "farming out" work to peripheral computing elements, freeing the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to process actual data. The Minnesota FORTRAN compiler for the machine was developed by Liddiard and Mundstock at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

and with it the 6600 could sustain 500 kiloflops on standard mathematical operations. In 1968, Cray completed the

CDC 7600 The CDC 7600 was designed by Seymour Cray to be the successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data Corporation, Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz (27.5 ns clock cycle) and had ...

, again the fastest computer in the world. At 36

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in terms of SI base u ...

, the 7600 had 3.6 times the

clock speed Clock rate or clock speed in computing typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses used to synchronize the operations of its components. It is used as an indicator of the processor's ...

of the 6600, but ran significantly faster due to other technical innovations. They sold only about 50 of the 7600s, not quite a failure. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company. Two years after his departure CDC delivered the STAR-100, which at 100 megaflops was three times the speed of the 7600. Along with the Texas Instruments ASC, the STAR-100 was one of the first machines to use

vector processing In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its Instruction (computer science), instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large Array d ...

⁠the idea having been inspired around 1964 by the

APL programming language APL (named after the book ''A Programming Language'') is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent m ...

. In 1956, a team at

Manchester University The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

in the United Kingdom began development of

MUSE In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, the Muses (, ) were the Artistic inspiration, inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric p ...

⁠a name derived from

microsecond A microsecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available. A microsecond is to one second, ...

with the aim of eventually building a computer that could operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million

instructions per second Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's Central processing unit, processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different Machine code, instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depen ...

. ''Mu'' (the name of the Greek letter ''μ'') is a prefix in the SI and other systems of units denoting a factor of 10⁻⁶ (one millionth). At the end of 1958,

Ferranti Ferranti International PLC or simply Ferranti was a UK-based electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century, from 1885 until its bankruptcy in 1993. At its peak, Ferranti was a significant player in power grid system ...

agreed to collaborate with Manchester University on the project, and the computer was shortly afterwards renamed

, with the joint venture under the control of

Tom Kilburn Tom Kilburn (11 August 1921 – 17 January 2001) was an English mathematician and computer scientist. Over his 30-year career, he was involved in the development of five computers of great historical significance. With Freddie Williams he wor ...

. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December nearly three years before the Cray CDC 6600 supercomputer was as one of the world's first

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s. It was considered at the time of its commissioning to be the most powerful computer in the world, equivalent to four

IBM 7094 The IBM 7090 is a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computer that was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 is the fourth member of the IBM 700/7000 se ...

s. It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. The Atlas pioneered

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage, is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a ver ...

and

paging In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that allows the physical Computer memory, memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation and requiring compact ...

as a way to extend its working memory by combining its 16,384 words of primary

core memory Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (laboratory), a highly specialized shared research resource * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber), ...

with an additional 96K words of secondary

drum memory Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. Many early computers, called drum computers or drum machines, used drum ...

. Atlas also pioneered the

Atlas Supervisor The Atlas Supervisor was the program which managed the allocation of processing resources of Manchester University's Atlas Computer so that the machine was able to act on many tasks and user programs concurrently. Its various functions includ ...

, "considered by many to be the first recognizable modern

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s

Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz

Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, eighty Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...

in 1976, and it became the most successful supercomputer in history. The Cray-1, which used integrated circuits with two gates per chip, was a

vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...

. It introduced a number of innovations, such as

chaining Chaining is a type of intervention that aims to create associations between behaviors in a behavior chain. A behavior chain is a sequence of behaviors that happen in a particular order where the outcome of the previous step in the chain serves a ...

, in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results that can be used immediately, without additional memory references which would otherwise reduce computational speed. The

Cray X-MP The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by Cray, Cray Research. It was announced in 1982 as the "cleaned up" successor to the 1975 Cray-1, and was the world's fastest computer from 1983 to 1985 with a quad-processor system perfo ...

(designed by

Steve Chen Steve Chen (; born August 25, 1978) is a Taiwanese-American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur who is one of the co-founders and previous chief technology officer of the video-sharing website YouTube. After he co-founded the company A ...

) was released in 1982 as a 105 MHz shared-memory parallel

with better chaining support and multiple memory pipelines. All three floating point pipelines on the X-MP could operate simultaneously. By 1983 Cray and Control Data were supercomputer leaders; despite its lead in the overall computer market, IBM was unable to produce a profitable competitor. The

Cray-2 The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, ...

, released in 1985, was a four-processor liquid cooled computer totally immersed in a tank of

Fluorinert Fluorinert is the trademarked brand name for the line of electronics coolant liquids sold commercially by 3M. As perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), all Fluorinert variants have an extremely high global warming potential (GWP), so should be used with ...

, which bubbled as it operated. It reached 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest supercomputer, and the first to break the gigaflop barrier. The Cray-2 was a totally new design. It did not use chaining and had a high memory latency, but used much pipelining and was ideal for problems that required large amounts of memory. The software costs in developing a supercomputer should not be underestimated, as evidenced by the fact that in the 1980s the cost for software development at Cray came to equal what was spent on hardware.} That trend was partly responsible for a move away from the in-house, Cray Operating System to

UNICOS UNICOS is a range of Unix and later Linux operating system (OS) variants developed by Cray for its supercomputers. UNICOS is the successor of the Cray Operating System (COS). It provides network clustering and source code compatibility layers fo ...

based on

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

. The

Cray Y-MP The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray, Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's Cray X-MP, X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-densit ...

, also designed by Steve Chen, was released in 1988 as an improvement of the X-MP and could have eight

s at 167 MHz with a peak performance of 333 megaflops per processor. In the late 1980s, Cray's experiment on the use of

gallium arsenide Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a Zincblende (crystal structure), zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monoli ...

semiconductors in the

Cray-3 The Cray-3 was a Vector processor, vector supercomputer, Seymour Cray's designated successor to the Cray-2. The system was one of the first major applications of gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors in computing, using hundreds of custom built ...

did not succeed. Seymour Cray began to work on a

massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of ...

computer in the early 1990s, but died in a car accident in 1996 before it could be completed. Cray Research did, however, produce such computers.

Massive processing: the 1990s

The

which set the frontiers of supercomputing in the mid to late 1980s had only 8 processors. In the 1990s, supercomputers with thousands of processors began to appear. Another development at the end of the 1980s was the arrival of Japanese supercomputers, some of which were modeled after the Cray-1. During the first half of the Strategic Computing Initiative, some massively parallel architectures were proven to work, such as the WARP systolic array, message-passing MIMD like the

Cosmic Cube The Cosmic Cube is a fictional object appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. There are multiple Cubes in the Marvel Universe, all of which are depicted as containment devices that can empower whoever wields them. Although th ...

hypercube,

SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...

like the

Connection Machine The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann arch ...

, etc. In 1987, a TeraOPS Computing Technology Program was proposed, with a goal of achieving 1 teraOPS (a trillion operations per second) by 1992, which was considered achievable by scaling up any of the previously proven architectures. Paragon XP-E - mesh

The SX-3/44R was announced by

NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inter ...

in 1989 and a year later earned the fastest-in-the-world title with a four-processor model. However, Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994. It had a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2,048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network. In the same timeframe the Intel Paragon could have 1,000 to 4,000

Intel i860 The Intel i860 (also known as 80860) is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning o ...

processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two-dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes; communicating via the

Message Passing Interface The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures. The MPI standard defines the syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of use ...

. By 1995, Cray was also shipping massively parallel systems, e.g. the

Cray T3E The Cray T3E was Cray Research's second-generation massively parallel supercomputer architecture, launched in late November 1995. The first T3E was installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in 1996. Like the previous Cray T3D, it was a fu ...

with over 2,000 processors, using a three-dimensional torus interconnect. The Paragon architecture soon led to the Intel

ASCI Red ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative ( ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the ...

supercomputer in the United States, which held the top supercomputing spot to the end of the 20th century as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative. This was also a mesh-based MIMD massively-parallel system with over 9,000 compute nodes and well over 12 terabytes of disk storage, but used off-the-shelf

Pentium Pro The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It implements the P6 (microarchitecture), P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686), and was the first x86 Intel C ...

processors that could be found in everyday personal computers. ASCI Red was the first system ever to break through the 1 teraflop barrier on the MP-

Linpack LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical linear algebra on digital computers. It was written in Fortran by Jack Dongarra, Jim Bunch, Cleve Moler, and Gilbert Stewart, and was intended for use on supercomputers in the 1970s and e ...

benchmark in 1996; eventually reaching 2 teraflops.

Petascale computing in the 21st century

Significant progress was made in the first decade of the 21st century. The efficiency of supercomputers continued to increase, but not dramatically so. The

Cray C90 The Cray C90 series (initially named the Y-MP C90) was a vector processor supercomputer launched by Cray Research in 1991. The C90 was a development of the Cray Y-MP architecture. Compared to the Y-MP, the C90 processor had a dual vector pipeline ...

used 500 kilowatts of power in 1991, while by 2003 the ASCI Q used 3,000 kW while being 2,000 times faster, increasing the performance per watt 300 fold. In 2004, the Earth Simulator supercomputer built by

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) reached 35.9 teraflops, using 640 nodes, each with eight proprietary

s. The

Blue Gene Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue ...

supercomputer architecture found widespread use in the early part of the 21st century, and 27 of the computers on the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list used that architecture. The Blue Gene approach is somewhat different in that it trades processor speed for low power consumption so that a larger number of processors can be used at air cooled temperatures. It can use over 60,000 processors, with 2048 processors "per rack", and connects them via a three-dimensional torus interconnect. Progress in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

has been rapid, in that China placed 51st on the TOP500 list in June 2003; this was followed by 14th in November 2003, 10th in June 2004, then 5th during 2005, before gaining the top spot in 2010 with the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-I supercomputer. In July 2011, the 8.1 petaflop Japanese K computer became the fastest in the world, using over 60,000

SPARC64 VIIIfx The SPARC64 V (''Zeus'') is a SPARC V9 microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The SPARC64 V was the basis for a series of successive processors designed for servers, and later, supercomputers. The servers series are the SPARC64 V+, VI, VI+, VII, ...

processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that the K computer is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world seven years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide. By 2014, the Earth Simulator had dropped off the list and by 2018 the K computer had dropped out of the top 10. By 2018,

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for ...

had become the world's most powerful supercomputer, at 200 petaFLOPS. In 2020, the Japanese once again took the top spot with the Fugaku supercomputer, capable of 442 PFLOPS. Finally, starting in 2022 and until the present (), the world's fastest supercomputer had become the Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Frontier A frontier is a political and geographical term referring to areas near or beyond a boundary. Australia The term "frontier" was frequently used in colonial Australia in the meaning of country that borders the unknown or uncivilised, th ...

, also known as the OLCF-5 and hosted at the

Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), formerly the National Leadership Computing Facility, is a designated user facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. It contains several supercomputers, the ...

(OLCF) in

Tennessee Tennessee (, ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina t ...

, United States. The Frontier is based on the Cray EX, is the world's first exascale

, and uses only

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

CPUs and GPUs; it achieved an Rmax of 1.102

exaFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measur ...

, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second.

Historical TOP500 table

This is a list of the computers which appeared at the top of the

list since 1993. The "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. Supercomputers-history

Export controls

The

CoCom The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) was established in 1949 at the beginning of the Cold War to coordinate controls on exports from Western Bloc countries to the Soviet Union and its allies. Operating through inform ...

and its later replacement, the

Wassenaar Arrangement The Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies, also known simply as the Wassenaar Arrangement, is a multilateral export control regime governing the international transfer of conventional ...

, legally regulated, i.e. required licensing and approval and record-keeping; or banned entirely, the export of high-performance computers (HPCs) to certain countries. Such controls have become harder to justify, leading to loosening of these regulations. Some have argued these regulations were never justified.

External links

Supercomputers (1960s-1980s)
at the

Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...

Supercomputers

Supercomputing A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

References

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