page_title: History of supercomputing
section_title: Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: History of supercomputing / Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s
caption_attribution_description: English: The first Atlas, installed at Manchester University and officially commissioned in 1962, was one of the world's first supercomputers, considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at that time. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
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 term "Super Computing" was first used in the New York World in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University.
  In 1957, a group of engineers left Sperry Corporation to form Control Data Corporation (CDC) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Seymour Cray left Sperry a year later to join his colleagues at CDC.  In 1960, Cray completed the CDC 1604, one of the first solid-state computers, 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 in 1964. Cray switched from germanium to silicon transistors, built by Fairchild Semiconductor, 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 restriction forced a very compact design with severe overheating problems, which were solved by introducing refrigeration, designed by Dean Roush. 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 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 and with it the 6600 could sustain 500 kiloflops on standard mathematical operations. In 1968, Cray completed the CDC 7600, again the fastest computer in the world. At 36 MHz, the 7600 had 3.6 times the clock speed 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 - the idea having been inspired around 1964 by the APL programming language.
  In 1956, a team at Manchester University in the United Kingdom, began development of MUSE — a name derived from microsecond engine — 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. Mu (or 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 agreed to begin to collaborate with Manchester University on the project, and the computer was shortly afterwards renamed Atlas, with the joint venture under the control of Tom Kilburn. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December 1962, nearly three years before the Cray CDC 6600 supercomputer was introduced, as one of the world's first supercomputers - and was considered to be the most powerful computer in England and for a very short time was considered to be one of the most powerful computers in the world, and equivalent to four IBM 7094s. It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. The Atlas pioneered the use of virtual memory and paging as a way to extend the Atlas's working memory by combining its 16,384 words of primary core memory with an additional 96K words of secondary drum memory. Atlas also pioneered the Atlas Supervisor, "considered by many to be the first recognizable modern operating system".
caption: The University of Manchester Atlas in January 1963.
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