History of supercomputing - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

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

Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....

(CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray

Seymour Cray

Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which would build many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited...

to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600

CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times...

, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.

In the 1970s, Cray formed his own company and using new approaches to machine architecture produced supercomputers which dominated the field until the end of the 1980s.

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 teraflop computational barrier.

Progress in first decade of the 21st century was dramatic and supercomputers with over 60,000 processors appeared, and reached petaflop performance levels.

The beginnings: CDC in the 1960s

In 1957 a group of engineers left Sperry Corporation

Sperry Corporation

Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the twentieth century...

to form Control Data Corporation

Control Data Corporation

(CDC) in Minneapolis, MN. Seymour Cray

Seymour Cray

left Sperry a year later to join his colleagues at CDC. In 1960 Cray completed the CDC 1604

CDC 1604

The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation. The 1604 is known as the first commercially successful transistorized computer. Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address to...

, the first solid state

Solid state

Solid state may refer to:In science:* Solid-state chemistry* Solid-state physics* Solid-state laser* Solid matterIn electronics:* Solid state , circuits built of solid materials* Solid-state fan...

computer, and the fastest computer in the world at a time when vacuum tubes were found in most large computers.

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 CDC 6600

CDC 6600

in 1964. Given that the 6600 outran all computers of the time by about 10 times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market when one hundred computers were sold at $8 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

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

compiler for the machine was developed by Liddiard and Mundstock at the University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

and with it the 6600 could sustain 500 kilo-FLOPS on standard mathematical operations. In 1968 Cray completed the CDC 7600

CDC 7600

The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using core and variable-size secondary memory...

, again the fastest computer in the world. At 36 MHz, the 7600 had about three and a half times the clock speed of the 6600, but ran significantly faster due to other technical innovations.

Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company. Two years after his departure CDC delivered the STAR-100

CDC STAR-100

The STAR-100 was a vector supercomputer designed, manufactured, and marketed by Control Data Corporation . It was one of the first machines to use a vector processor to improve performance on appropriate scientific applications....

which at 100 megaflops was three times they speed of the 7600. Along with the Texas Instruments ASC, the STAR-100 was one of the first machines to use vector processing - the idea having been inspired around 1964 by the APL programming language

APL programming language

APL is an interactive array-oriented language and integrated development environment, which is available from a number of commercial and noncommercial vendors and for most computer platforms. It is based on a mathematical notation developed by Kenneth E...

The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s

Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it become one of the most successful supercomputers in history. The Cray 1 was a vector processor

Vector processor

A vector processor, or array processor, is a central processing unit that implements an instruction set containing instructions that operate on one-dimensional arrays of data called vectors. This is in contrast to a scalar processor, whose instructions operate on single data items...

which introduced a number of innovations such as chaining

Chaining (vector processing)

In computing, chaining is a technique used in computer architecture in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results which can be used immediately, without additional memory references which reduce computational speed....

in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results which can be used immediately, without additional memory references which reduce computational speed. The Cray X-MP

Cray X-MP

The Cray X-MP was a supercomputer designed, built and sold by 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...

(designed by Steve Chen) was released in 1982 as a 105 MHz shared-memory parallel

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...

vector processor

Vector processor

with better chaining support and multiple memory pipelines. All three floating point pipelines on the XMP could operate simultaneously.

The Cray-2

Cray-2

The Cray-2 was a four-processor ECL vector supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. It was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray Research X-MP designed by Steve Chen in that spot...

released in 1985 was an 8 processor liquid cooled

Computer cooling

Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer components, to keep components within their safe operating temperature limits.Various cooling methods help to improve processor performance or reduce the noise of cooling fans....

computer and Fluorinert

Fluorinert

Fluorinert is the trademarked brand name for the line of electronics coolant liquids sold commercially by 3M. It is an electrically insulating, stable fluorocarbon-based fluid which is used in various cooling applications. It is mainly used for cooling electronics...

was pumped through it as it operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest until 1990 when ETA-10G

ETA10

The ETA10 was a line of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by ETA Systems, a spin-off division of Control Data Corporation . The ETA10 was announced in 1986, with the first deliveries made in early 1987...

from CDC overtook it. The Cray 2 was a totally new design and did not use chaining and had a high memory latency, but used much deep 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 the spent on hardware. That trend was partly responsible for a move away from the in-house, Cray Operating System

Cray Operating System

The Cray Operating System was Cray Research's proprietary operating system for its Cray-1 and Cray X-MP supercomputers, and those platforms' main OS until replaced by UNICOS in the late 1980s...

to UNICOS

Unicos

UNICOS is the name of a range of Unix-like operating system variants developed by Cray for its supercomputers. UNICOS is the successor of the Cray Operating System . It provides network clustering and source code compatibility layers for some other Unixes. UNICOS was originally introduced in 1985...

based on Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

.

The Cray Y-MP

Cray Y-MP

The Cray Y-MP was a supercomputer sold by Cray Research from 1988, and the successor to the company's X-MP. The Y-MP retained software compatibility with the X-MP, but extended the address registers from 24 to 32 bits. High-density VLSI ECL technology was used and a new liquid cooling system was...

, also designed by Steve Chen, was released in 1988 as an improvement of the XMP and could have eight vector processors 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 semiconductors in the Cray-3

Cray-3

The Cray-3 was a vector supercomputer intended to be Cray Research's successor to the Cray-2. The system was to be the first major application of gallium arsenide semiconductors in computing. The project was not considered a success, and the parent company in Minneapolis decided to end work on the...

did not succeed. Cray began to work on a massively parallel

MIMD

In computing, MIMD is a technique employed to achieve parallelism. Machines using MIMD have a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently. At any time, different processors may be executing different instructions on different pieces of data...

computer in the early 1990s, but died in a car accident in 1996 before it could be completed.

Massive processing: the 1990s

The Cray-2

Cray-2

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.
The SX-3/44R

SX-3 supercomputer

The SX-3 supercomputer family was developed by NEC Corporation in Japan and announced in April l989. The SX-3/44R became the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1990....

was announced by NEC Corporation in 1989 and a year later earned the fastest in the world title with a 4 processor model. However, Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel

Numerical Wind Tunnel

Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics...

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

Hitachi SR2201

The HITACHI SR2201 was a distributed memory parallel system that was introduced in March 1996 by Hitachi. Its processor, the 150 MHz HARP-1E based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture, solved the cache miss penalty by pseudo vector processing . In PVP, data was loaded by prefetching to a special...

on the other obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three dimensional crossbar

Crossbar

- Structural engineering :* A primitive latch consisting of a post barring a door* The top tube of a bicycle frame* The horizontal member of many sports goals including those for hockey, association football, rugby league, rugby union and American football...

network.

In the same timeframe the Intel Paragon

Intel Paragon

The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely...

could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860

Intel i860

The Intel i860 was a RISC microprocessor from Intel, first released in 1989. The i860 was one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set since the failed Intel i432 from the 1980s...

processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD

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

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers...

. By 1995 Cray was also shipping massively parallel systems, e.g. the Cray T3E

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 fully distributed memory machine using a 3D torus...

with over 2,000 processors, using a three dimensional torus interconnect.

The Paragon architecture soon led to the Intel ASCI Red

ASCI Red

ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative . ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia in late 1996. The design was based on the Intel Paragon computer...

supercomputer 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

Pentium Pro

The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel introduced in November 1, 1995 . It introduced the P6 microarchitecture and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications...

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

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 early 1980s...

benchmark in 1996; eventually reaching 2 teraflops.

Petaflop computing in the 21st century

Significant progress was made in the first decade of the 21st century and it was shown that the power of a large number of small processors can be harnessed to achieve high performance, e.g. as in System X

System X (computing)

System X is a supercomputer assembled by Virginia Tech's Advanced Research Computing facility in the summer of 2003 that was originally composed of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers. System X ran at 12.25 Teraflops, , and was ranked #3 on November 16, 2003 and #280 in the July 2008 edition of...

's use of 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5

Power Mac G5

The Power Mac G5 is Apple's marketing name for models of the Power Macintosh that contains the IBM PowerPC G5 CPU. The professional-grade computer was the most powerful in Apple's lineup when it was introduced, widely hailed as the first 64-bit PC, and was touted by Apple as the fastest personal...

computers quickly assembled in the summer of 2003 to gain 12.25 Teraflops.

The efficiency of supercomputers continued to increase, but not dramatically so. The Cray C90

Cray C90

The Cray C90 series 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 and a faster 4.1 ns clock cycle , which together gave three times the...

used 500 kilowatts of power in 1991, while by 2003 the ASCI Q

ASCI Q

The ASCI Q was a supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, installed in 2003. It was a DEC AlphaServer SC45/GS Cluster and reached 7.727 Teraflops....

used 3,000 kW while being 2,000 times faster, increasing the performance by watt 300 fold.

In 2004 the Earth Simulator

Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator , developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics...

supercomputer built by NEC

NEC

, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....

at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) reached 131 teraflops, using 640 nodes, each with eight proprietary vector processing chips.

The IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

Blue Gene

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce...

supercomputer architecture found widespread use in the early part of the 21st century, and 27 of the computers on the TOP500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

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

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

has been rapid, in that China placed 51st on the TOP500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

list in June 2003, then 14th in November 2003 and 10th in June 2004 and then 5th during 2005, before gaining the top spot in 2010 with the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-I

Tianhe-I

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 , in English, "Milky Way Number One", is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.566 petaFLOPS...

supercomputer.

In July 2011 the 8.1 petaflop Japanese K computer

K computer

The K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...

became the fastest in the world using over 60,000 commercial scalar

Scalar processor

Scalar processors represent the simplest class of computer processors. A scalar processor processes one datum at a time . , a scalar processor is classified as a SISD processor .In a vector processor, by contrast, a single instruction operates simultaneously on multiple data items...

SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that K computer

K computer

is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world 7 years after holding the top spot demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.

Historical TOP500 table

This is a list of the computers which appeared at the top of the Top500

TOP500

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year...

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

Year	Supercomputer	Peak speed (Rmax) FLOPS In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...	Location
1993	Fujitsu Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues.... Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics...	124.50 GFLOPS	National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo Tokyo , ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family... , Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
1993	Intel Paragon Intel Paragon The Intel Paragon was a series of massively parallel supercomputers produced by Intel. The Paragon XP/S was a productized version of the experimental Touchstone Delta system built at Caltech, launched in 1992. The Paragon superseded Intel's earlier iPSC/860 system, to which it was closely... XP/S 140	143.40 GFLOPS	DoE-Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories The Sandia National Laboratories, managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation , are two major United States Department of Energy research and development national laboratories.... , New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
1994	Fujitsu Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues.... Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics...	170.40 GFLOPS	National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo Tokyo , ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family... , Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
1996	Hitachi Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Marunouchi 1-chome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The company is the parent of the Hitachi Group as part of the larger DKB Group companies... SR2201 Hitachi SR2201 The HITACHI SR2201 was a distributed memory parallel system that was introduced in March 1996 by Hitachi. Its processor, the 150 MHz HARP-1E based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture, solved the cache miss penalty by pseudo vector processing . In PVP, data was loaded by prefetching to a special... /1024	220.4 GFLOPS	University of Tokyo University of Tokyo , abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university... , Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
1996	Hitachi Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Marunouchi 1-chome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The company is the parent of the Hitachi Group as part of the larger DKB Group companies... CP-PACS Hitachi SR2201 The HITACHI SR2201 was a distributed memory parallel system that was introduced in March 1996 by Hitachi. Its processor, the 150 MHz HARP-1E based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture, solved the cache miss penalty by pseudo vector processing . In PVP, data was loaded by prefetching to a special... /2048	368.2 GFLOPS	University of Tsukuba University of Tsukuba is located in the city of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture in the Kantō region of Japan. The University has 28 college clusters and schools with a total of around 15,000 students... , Tsukuba, Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
1997	Intel ASCI Red ASCI Red ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative . ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia in late 1996. The design was based on the Intel Paragon computer... /9152	1.338 TFLOPS	DoE-Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories The Sandia National Laboratories, managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation , are two major United States Department of Energy research and development national laboratories.... , New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
1999	Intel ASCI Red ASCI Red ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative . ASCI Red was built by Intel and installed at Sandia in late 1996. The design was based on the Intel Paragon computer... /9632	2.3796 TFLOPS
2000	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas... ASCI White ASCI White ASCI White was a supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.It was a computer cluster based on IBM's commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 of these machines were connected together for ASCI White, with 16 processors per node and 8,192 processors in total with 6 terabytes of...	7.226 TFLOPS	DoE-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952... , California California California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
2002	NEC Earth Simulator Earth Simulator The Earth Simulator , developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics...	35.86 TFLOPS	Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama Yokohama is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu... , Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
2004	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas... Blue Gene/L Blue Gene Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS . It is a cooperative project among IBM Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce...	70.72 TFLOPS	DoE United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material... /IBM Rochester IBM International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas... , Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
2005		136.8 TFLOPS	DoE United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material... /U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952... , California California California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
2005		280.6 TFLOPS
2007		478.2 TFLOPS
2008	IBM IBM International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas... Roadrunner	1.026 PFLOPS	DoE-Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico... , New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
2008		1.105 PFLOPS
2009	Cray Cray Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,... Jaguar Jaguar (computer) Jaguar is a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar has a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraflops . It has 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operates with a version of Linux called the...	1.759 PFLOPS	DoE-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the DOE's largest science and energy laboratory. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville... , Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area... , USA United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
2010	Tianhe-I Tianhe-I Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 , in English, "Milky Way Number One", is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.566 petaFLOPS... A	2.566 PFLOPS	National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin Tianjin ' is a metropolis in northern China and one of the five national central cities of the People's Republic of China. It is governed as a direct-controlled municipality, one of four such designations, and is, thus, under direct administration of the central government... , China People's Republic of China China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
2011	Fujitsu Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues.... K computer K computer The K computer – named for the Japanese word , which stands for 10 quadrillion – is a supercomputer being produced by Fujitsu at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan. In June 2011, TOP500 ranked K the world's fastest supercomputer, with a rating...	10.51 PFLOPS	RIKEN RIKEN is a large natural sciences research institute in Japan. Founded in 1917, it now has approximately 3000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan, the main one in Wako, just outside Tokyo... , Kobe Kobe , pronounced , is the fifth-largest city in Japan and is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture on the southern side of the main island of Honshū, approximately west of Osaka... , Japan Japan Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

The beginnings: CDC in the 1960s

The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s

Massive processing: the 1990s

Petaflop computing in the 21st century

Historical TOP500 table

See also