Historia De Supercomputadoras

History of supercomputing
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.[1] The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.[2][3]
In the 1970s, Cray formed his own companyand 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 parallelsupercomputers 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 engineersleft Sperry Corporation to form Control Data Corporation (CDC) in Minneapolis, MN. Seymour Cray left Sperry a year later to join his colleagues at CDC.[1] In 1960 Cray completed the CDC 1604, the first solid state computer, and the fastest computer in the world at a time when vacuum tubes were found in most large computers.[4]

The CDC 6600 with the system console
Around 1960 Cray decided todesign 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. Heran 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.[5] 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.[6][4]
The6600 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 kilo-FLOPS on standard mathematical operations.[7] In 1968 Cray completed the CDC 7600, again thefastest computer in the world.[4] 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. They only sold about 50 of the 7600s, not quite a failure. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company.[4] Two years after his departure CDC delivered the STAR-100 which at 100 megaflops was three times the speed of the7600. 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
The Cray era: mid-1970s and 1980s

A liquid cooled Cray-2 supercomputer
Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it became the most successful supercomputer in history.[9][10]The Cray 1 used integrated circuits with two gates per chip and was a vector processor which introduced a number of innovations such as chaining in which scalar and vector registers generate interim results which can be used immediately, without additional memory references which reduce computational speed.[11] [12]The Cray X-MP (designed by Steve Chen) was released in 1982 as a 105 MHz...