Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of circulation. Supercomputers introduces in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985-1990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s “supercomputer market crash”. Today, supercomputer are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by “traditional” companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. The IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National laboratory, is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world. The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today’s supercomputer tends to become tomorrow’s ordinary computer. CDC’s early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processor at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel to become the standard. Typical numbers of processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousand of “ordinary” CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom design. Toda, parallel designs are based on “off the shelf” server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Opteron, or Xeon, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer cluster using commodity processors, combined with custom interconnects.