page_title: History of supercomputing
hierarchical_section_title: History of supercomputing
caption_attribution_description: English: Ein CRAY-1, aufgenommen im Deutschen Museum, München.
context_page_description: The main credit to supercomputers goes to the inventor of CDC -6600, Seymour Cray. The history of supercomputing goes back to the early 1920s in the United States with the IBM tabulators at Columbia University and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation, designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, 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, the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, and the IBM 7030 Stretch and the Atlas, both in 1962.
  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.
context_section_description: The main credit to supercomputers goes to the inventor of CDC -6600, Seymour Cray. The history of supercomputing goes back to the early 1920s in the United States with the IBM tabulators at Columbia University and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC), designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, 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, the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, and the IBM 7030 Stretch and the Atlas, both in 1962.
  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 the first decade of the 21st century was dramatic and supercomputers with over 60,000 processors appeared, reaching petaflop performance levels.
caption: A Cray-1 supercomputer preserved at the Deutsches Museum
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