History of supercomputing explained

The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were 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.[1] [2] However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s,[3] and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960),[4] the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962),[5] and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.

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 teraFLOPS computational barrier.

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

Beginnings: 1950s and 1960s

The term "Super Computing" was first used in the New York World in 1929[6] to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University.[7]

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.[8] In 1960, Cray completed the CDC 1604, one of the first generation of commercially successful transistorized computers and at the time of its release, the fastest computer in the world.[9] However, the sole fully transistorized Harwell CADET was operational in 1951, and IBM delivered its commercially successful transistorized IBM 7090 in 1959.

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.[10] The 6600 outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three.[11] [12] With performance of up to three megaFLOPS,[13] [14] it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market when two hundred computers were sold at $9 million each.[9] [15]

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.[16] In 1968, Cray completed the CDC 7600, again the fastest computer in the world.[9] 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.[9] 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 processing⁠the idea having been inspired around 1964 by the APL programming language.[17]

In 1956, a team at Manchester University in the United Kingdom began development of MUSE⁠a name derived from microsecond 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.[18] Mu (the name of the Greek letter 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 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 nearly three years before the Cray CDC 6600 supercomputer was as one of the world's first supercomputers. It was considered at the time of its commissioning to be the most powerful computer in the world, equivalent to four IBM 7094s. It was said that whenever Atlas went offline half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost.[19] The Atlas pioneered virtual memory and paging as a way to extend its 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".

The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s

Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, and it became the most successful supercomputer in history.[20] The Cray-1, which used integrated circuits with two gates per chip, was a vector processor. It introduced a number of innovations, such as chaining, in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results that can be used immediately, without additional memory references which would otherwise reduce computational speed.[10] [21] The Cray X-MP (designed by Steve Chen) was released in 1982 as a 105 MHz shared-memory parallel vector processor with better chaining support and multiple memory pipelines. All three floating point pipelines on the X-MP could operate simultaneously.[21] By 1983 Cray and Control Data were supercomputer leaders; despite its lead in the overall computer market, IBM was unable to produce a profitable competitor.[22]

The Cray-2, released in 1985, was a four-processor liquid cooled computer totally immersed in a tank of Fluorinert, which bubbled as it operated. It reached 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest supercomputer, and the first to break the gigaflop barrier.[23] The Cray-2 was a totally new design. It did not use chaining and had a high memory latency, but used much pipelining and was ideal for problems that required large amounts of memory.[21] 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 was spent on hardware.[24] That trend was partly responsible for a move away from the in-house, Cray Operating System to UNICOS based on Unix.[24]

The Cray Y-MP, also designed by Steve Chen, was released in 1988 as an improvement of the X-MP and could have eight vector processors at 167 MHz with a peak performance of 333 megaflops per processor.[21] In the late 1980s, Cray's experiment on the use of gallium arsenide semiconductors in the Cray-3 did not succeed. Seymour Cray began to work on a massively parallel computer in the early 1990s, but died in a car accident in 1996 before it could be completed. Cray Research did, however, produce such computers.[25] [10]

Massive processing: the 1990s

The 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 was announced by NEC Corporation in 1989 and a year later earned the fastest-in-the-world title with a four-processor model.[26] However, Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994. It had a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processor.[27] [28] The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2,048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network.[29] [30] [31]

In the same timeframe the Intel Paragon could have 1,000 to 4,000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a 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.[32] By 1995, Cray was also shipping massively parallel systems, e.g. the Cray T3E with over 2,000 processors, using a three-dimensional torus interconnect.[33] [34]

The Paragon architecture soon led to the Intel ASCI Red supercomputer in the United States, 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 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 benchmark in 1996; eventually reaching 2 teraflops.[35]

Petascale computing in the 21st century

See main article: Petascale computing.

Significant progress was made in the first decade of the 21st century. The efficiency of supercomputers continued to increase, but not dramatically so. The Cray C90 used 500 kilowatts of power in 1991, while by 2003 the ASCI Q used 3,000 kW while being 2,000 times faster, increasing the performance per watt 300 fold.[36]

In 2004, the Earth Simulator supercomputer built by NEC at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) reached 35.9 teraflops, using 640 nodes, each with eight proprietary vector processors.[37]

The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer architecture found widespread use in the early part of the 21st century, and 27 of the computers on the TOP500 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.[38] [39]

Progress in China has been rapid, in that China placed 51st on the TOP500 list in June 2003; this was followed by 14th in November 2003, 10th in June 2004, then 5th during 2005, before gaining the top spot in 2010 with the 2.5 petaflop Tianhe-I supercomputer.[40] [41]

In July 2011, the 8.1 petaflop Japanese K computer became the fastest in the world, using over 60,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors housed in over 600 cabinets. The fact that the K computer is over 60 times faster than the Earth Simulator, and that the Earth Simulator ranks as the 68th system in the world seven years after holding the top spot, demonstrates both the rapid increase in top performance and the widespread growth of supercomputing technology worldwide.[42] [43] [44] By 2014, the Earth Simulator had dropped off the list and by 2018 the K computer had dropped out of the top 10. By 2018, Summit had become the world's most powerful supercomputer, at 200 petaFLOPS. In 2020, the Japanese once again took the top spot with the Fugaku supercomputer, capable of 442 PFLOPS. Finally, starting in 2022 and until the present, the world's fastest supercomputer had become the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, also known as the OLCF-5 and hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States. The Frontier is based on the Cray EX, is the world's first exascale supercomputer, and uses only AMD CPUs and GPUs; it achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second.[45] [46] [47] [48] [49]

Historical TOP500 table

See main article: List of fastest computers.

This is a list of the computers which appeared at the top of the TOP500 list since 1993.[50] The "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating.

Year Supercomputer Power efficiency
(GFLOPS per Watt)
Location
1993Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel124.50 GFLOPSNational Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1993Intel Paragon XP/S 140143.40 GFLOPSDoE-Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel170.40 GFLOPSNational Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996Hitachi SR2201/1024220.40 GFLOPSUniversity of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi CP-PACS/2048368.20 GFLOPSUniversity of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997Intel ASCI Red/91521.338 TFLOPSDoE-Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999Intel ASCI Red/96322.3796 TFLOPS
2000IBM ASCI White7.226 TFLOPSDoE-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002NEC Earth Simulator35.860 TFLOPSEarth Simulator Center, Yokohama, Japan
2004IBM Blue Gene/L70.720 TFLOPS <-- Technically the same system as the two neighboring entries -->DoE/IBM Rochester, Minnesota, USA
2005<-- Technically the same system as the next two entries -->136.800 TFLOPS <-- Technically the same system as next two entries -->DoE/U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
280.600 TFLOPS <-- upgrade of prior system -->
2007478.200 TFLOPS <-- upgrade of prior system -->
2008IBM Roadrunner1.026 PFLOPSDoE-Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1.105 PFLOPS0.445
2009Cray Jaguar1.759 PFLOPSDoE-Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA
2010Tianhe-IA2.566 PFLOPS0.635National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, China
2011Fujitsu K computer10.510 PFLOPS0.825Riken, Kobe, Japan
2012IBM Sequoia16.320 PFLOPSLawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2012Cray Titan17.590 PFLOPSOak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA
2013NUDT Tianhe-233.860 PFLOPS2.215Guangzhou, China
2016Sunway TaihuLight93.010 PFLOPS6.051Wuxi, China
2018IBM Summit122.300 PFLOPS14.668DoE-Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA
2020Fugaku415.530 PFLOPS15.418Riken, Kobe, Japan
2021Frontier>1.1 EFLOPSOak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Tennessee, USA

Export controls

The CoCom and its later replacement, the Wassenaar Arrangement, legally regulated, i.e. required licensing and approval and record-keeping; or banned entirely, the export of high-performance computers (HPCs) to certain countries. Such controls have become harder to justify, leading to loosening of these regulations. Some have argued these regulations were never justified.[51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56]

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: History of computing in education . John . Impagliazzo . John A. N. . Lee . 2004 . 1-4020-8135-9 . 172 . Springer . 20 February 2018.
  2. Book: The American Midwest: an interpretive encyclopedia . Richard . Sisson . Christian K. . Zacher . 2006 . 0-253-34886-2 . 1489 . Indiana University Press .
  3. Web site: IBM NORC . Frank da Cruz . 2004 . 25 October 2013 . 20 February 2018.
  4. Book: David E. . Lundstrom . A Few Good Men from UNIVAC . MIT Press . 1984 . 9780735100107 . 20 February 2018.
  5. David Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from UNIVAC, page 90, lists LARC and STRETCH as supercomputers.
  6. Book: Eames, Charles . Eames . Ray . A Computer Perspective . 1973 . Harvard University Press . Cambridge, Mass . 95 . . Page 95 identifies the article as News: Super Computing Machines Shown . New York World . March 1, 1920 . . However, the article shown on page 95 references the Statistical Bureau in Hamilton Hall, and an article at the Columbia Computing History web site states that such did not exist until 1929. See The Columbia Difference Tabulator - 1931
  7. Web site: Super Computing Machines Shown (in New York World) . 1920. 26 February 2024.
  8. Book: Hardware software co-design of a multimedia SOC platform . Sao-Jie . Chen . Guang-Huei . Lin . Pao-Ann . Hsiung . Yu-Hen . Hu . 2009 . 9781402096235 . 70–72 . . 20 February 2018.
  9. Book: Hannan, Caryn . Wisconsin Biographical Dictionary . 2008 . 978-1-878592-63-7 . 83–84 . State History Publications . 20 February 2018.
  10. Book: Murray, Charles J. . The Supermen . Wiley & Sons . 1997 . 9780471048855 .
  11. "Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three times faster than the next fastest machine of its day, the IBM 7030 Stretch." Book: Making a World of Difference: Engineering Ideas into Reality. 978-0309312653. National Academy of Engineering . 2014.
  12. "In 1964 Cray's CDC 6600 replaced Stretch as the fastest computer on Earth." Book: Sofroniou, Andreas . Expert Systems, Knowledge Engineering for Human Replication. 978-1291595093 . 2013. Lulu.com .
  13. Web site: The History of Supercomputers. Sebastian . Anthony . April 10, 2012 . 2015-02-02. ExtremeTech.
  14. Web site: CDC 6600. . 2015-02-02. Encyclopædia Britannica.
  15. Book: Ceruzzi, Paul E. . A history of modern computing . MIT Press . 2003 . 978-0-262-53203-7 . 161 . registration . 20 February 2018.
  16. 10.1145/361598.361914 . Frisch . Michael J. . December 1972 . Remarks on algorithm 352 [S22], algorithm 385 [S13], algorithm 392 [D3] . Communications of the ACM . 15 . 12 . 1074. 6571977 . free .
  17. Book: Fosdick, Lloyd Dudley . An Introduction to high-performance scientific computing . 1996 . 0-262-06181-3 . 418 . registration . MIT Press.
  18. Web site: The Atlas . University of Manchester . 21 September 2010 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20120728105352/http://www.computer50.org/kgill/atlas/atlas.html . 28 July 2012 .
  19. Book: Lavington, Simon Hugh . A History of Manchester Computers . 1998 . 2 . The British Computer Society . Swindon . 978-1-902505-01-5 . 41–52 .
  20. Book: Readings in computer architecture . Mark Donald . Hill . Norman Jouppi . Norman Paul . Jouppi . Gurindar . Sohi . 1999 . 978-1-55860-539-8 . 41–48. Gulf Professional .
  21. Book: Parallel computing for real-time signal processing and control . limited . M. O. . Tokhi . Mohammad Alamgir . Hossain . 2003 . 978-1-85233-599-1 . 201-202. Springer .
  22. Greenwald . John . 1983-07-11 . The Colossus That Works . live . subscription . Time . https://web.archive.org/web/20080514004334/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949693-2,00.html . 2008-05-14 . 2019-05-18.
  23. Due to Soviet propaganda, it can be read sometimes that the Soviet supercomputer M13 was the first to reach the gigaflops barrier. Actually, the M13 construction began in 1984, but it was not operational before 1986. Rogachev Yury Vasilievich, Russian Virtual Computer Museum
  24. Book: MacKenzie, Donald . Knowing machines: essays on technical change . 1998 . 0-262-63188-1 . 149–151. MIT Press .
  25. Book: Reilly, Edwin D. . Milestones in computer science and information technology . registration . 2003 . 1-57356-521-0 . 65. Bloomsbury Academic .
  26. Book: Computing methods in applied sciences and engineering . R. . Glowinski . A. . Lichnewsky . January 1990 . 0-89871-264-5 . 353–360.
  27. Web site: TOP500 Annual Report 1994 . 1 October 1996.
  28. N. . Hirose . M. . Fukuda . 1997 . Numerical Wind Tunnel (NWT) and CFD Research at National Aerospace Laboratory . Proceedings of HPC-Asia '97 . IEEE Computer Society . 10.1109/HPC.1997.592130.
  29. H. . Fujii . Y. . Yasuda . H. . Akashi . Y. . Inagami . M. . Koga . O. . Ishihara . M. . Kashiyama . H. . Wada . T. . Sumimoto . Architecture and performance of the Hitachi SR2201 massively parallel processor system . Proceedings of 11th International Parallel Processing Symposium . April 1997 . 233–241 . 10.1109/IPPS.1997.580901. 0-8186-7793-7 .
  30. Y. . Iwasaki . The CP-PACS project . Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements . 60 . 1–2 . January 1998 . 246–254 . 10.1016/S0920-5632(97)00487-8. hep-lat/9709055 . 1998NuPhS..60..246I .
  31. A.J. van der Steen, Overview of recent supercomputers, Publication of the NCF, Stichting Nationale Computer Faciliteiten, the Netherlands, January 1997.
  32. Book: Reed, Daniel A. . Scalable input/output: achieving system balance . 2003 . 978-0-262-68142-1 . 182. MIT Press .
  33. Cray Sells First T3E-1350 Supercomputer to PhillipsPetroleum . Business Wire . Gale Group . 7 August 2000 . Seattle .
  34. N. R.. Agida. et al.. Blue Gene/L Torus Interconnection Network. IBM Journal of Research and Development. 45. 2–3. March–May 2005. 265. 9 February 2012 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20110815102821/http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2008/cs8803hpc_spring/papers/bgLtorusnetwork.pdf . 15 August 2011 .
  35. Algorithms for Parallel Processing . Enabling Department-Scale Supercomputing . 105 . David S. . Greenberg . Michael T. . Heath . 1998 . 0-387-98680-4 . 323 . 20 February 2018.
  36. Wu-chun . Feng . Making a Case for Efficient Supercomputing . ACM Queue . 1 . 7 . 1 October 2003 . 54–64 . 10.1145/957717.957772 . 11283177 . free .
  37. Tetsuya . Sato . The Earth Simulator: Roles and Impacts . Nuclear Physics B: Proceedings Supplements . 102 . 129 . 10.1016/S0920-5632(03)02511-8 . 2004. 2004NuPhS.129..102S .
  38. Early Experience with Scientific Applications on the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer . George . Almasi . et al. . Euro-Par 2005 parallel processing: 11th International Euro-Par Conference . José Cardoso . Cunha . Pedro D. . Medeiros . 2005 . 560–567 . 9783540319252 .
  39. News: IBM uncloaks 20 petaflops BlueGene/Q super . The Register . 22 November 2010 . Timothy Prickett . Morgan.
  40. Book: Getting up to speed: the future of supercomputing . limited . Susan L. . Graham . Marc . Snir . Cynthia A. . Patterson . 2005 . 0-309-09502-6 . 188. National Academies Press .
  41. News: China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S. . The New York Times . Ashlee . Vance . Ashlee Vance . 28 October 2010 . 20 February 2018.
  42. News: Japanese supercomputer 'K' is world's fastest. 20 June 2011. The Telegraph. 20 June 2011.
  43. News: Japanese 'K' Computer Is Ranked Most Powerful. 20 June 2011. The New York Times. 20 June 2011.
  44. Web site: Supercomputer 'K computer' Takes First Place in World. 20 June 2011. Fujitsu.
  45. Web site: Wells . Jack . March 19, 2018 . Powering the Road to National HPC Leadership . OpenPOWER Summit 2018 . March 25, 2018 . August 4, 2020 . https://web.archive.org/web/20200804004021/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tmWN9PR-ZU&t=2h24m41s . live .
  46. Web site: Bethea . Katie . February 13, 2018 . Frontier: OLCF'S Exascale Future – Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20180310203823/https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2018/02/13/frontier-olcfs-exascale-future/ . March 10, 2018 . Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Leadership Computing Facility.
  47. Web site: October 9, 2020 . DOE Under Secretary for Science Dabbar's Exascale Update . live . https://web.archive.org/web/20201028093045/https://insidehpc.com/2020/10/doe-under-secretary-for-science-dabbars-exascale-update-frontier-to-be-first-aurora-to-be-monitored/ . October 28, 2020 . insideHPC.
  48. News: Don Clark . May 30, 2022 . U.S. Retakes Top Spot in Supercomputer Race . The New York Times . June 1, 2022 . June 1, 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20220601230913/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/30/business/us-supercomputer-frontier.html . live .
  49. News: Larabel . Michael . AMD-Powered Frontier Supercomputer Tops Top500 At 1.1 Exaflops, Tops Green500 Too . June 1, 2022 . . May 30, 2022 . en . June 6, 2022 . https://web.archive.org/web/20220606064113/https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Top500-Green500-Frontier . live .
  50. Web site: Sublist Generator . Top500 . 2017 . 20 February 2018.
  51. Book: Export controls and nonproliferation policy . Complexities of Setting Export Control Thresholds: Computers . DIANE Publishing . 9781428920521 . May 1994.
  52. Peter . Wolcott . Seymour . Goodman . Patrick . Homer . High Performance Computing Export Controls: Navigating Choppy Waters . Communications of the ACM . November 1998 . 41 . 11 . 27–30 . 10.1145/287831.287836 . New York, USA. 18519822 . free .
  53. Glenn J. . McLoughlin . Ian F. . Fergusson . High Performance Computers and Export Control Policy . 10 February 2003.
  54. Web site: Seth . Brugger . U.S. Revises Computer Export Control Regulations . 1 September 2000 . Arms Control Association.
  55. Web site: Export Controls for High Performance Computers . 24 June 2011.
  56. News: Jeff . Blagdon . US removes sanctions on computer exports to Iran . 30 May 2013.