Supercomputer (CDC 6600 to Cray-1)
Seymour Cray's CDC 6600 (1964) ran about ten times faster than any rival, and the Cray-1 (1976) added vector processing; such machines made large physics and weather simulations possible.
Open in the interactive tree →The CDC 6600, released in September 1964, managed about 3 million floating-point operations a second; around 100 were sold, many to nuclear-weapons laboratories and universities. The Cray-1, first installed at Los Alamos in 1976, was a vector machine that works on whole rows of numbers at once, and it was used for jobs such as weather forecasting. From the 1990s the fastest machines were built from thousands of ordinary processors (ranked on the TOP500 list since 1993) and since 2012 with graphics chips as well. Exascale machines such as Frontier (2022) are the direct descendants.
Prerequisites
- Stored-Program Computer (von Neumann)1945A supercomputer is the stored-program computer pushed to its speed limit.
- Transistor1947The CDC 6600 used fast silicon transistors instead of slower germanium ones.
- Integrated Circuit1958-1959The Cray-1 was built from integrated circuits.
Unlocks
- Atmospheric Reanalysis (ERA5)1996-2020Re-running decades of weather needs the biggest supercomputers.
- Exascale Supercomputers2022Frontier and the other exascale machines are the newest generation of this line.