Wednesday, 14 December 2011

The beginnings: CDC in the 1960s

In 1957 a accumulation of engineers larboard Sperry Corporation to anatomy Control Abstracts Corporation (CDC) in Minneapolis, MN. Seymour Cray larboard Sperry a year afterwards to accompany his colleagues at CDC.1 In 1960 Cray completed the CDC 1604, the aboriginal solid accompaniment computer, and the fastest computer in the apple at a time back exhaustion tubes were begin in best ample computers.4

The CDC 6600 with the arrangement console

Around 1960 Cray absitively to architecture a computer that would be the fastest in the apple by a ample margin. Afterwards four years of analysis forth with Jim Thornton, and Dean Roush and about 30 added engineers Cray completed the CDC 6600 in 1964. Given that the 6600 outran all computers of the time by about 10 times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and authentic the supercomputing bazaar back one hundred computers were awash at $8 actor each.54

The 6600 acquired acceleration by "farming out" assignment to borderline accretion elements, absolution the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to action absolute data. The Minnesota FORTRAN compiler for the apparatus was developed by Liddiard and Mundstock at the University of Minnesota and with it the 6600 could sustain 500 kilo-FLOPS on accepted algebraic operations.6 In 1968 Cray completed the CDC 7600, afresh the fastest computer in the world.4 At 36 MHz, the 7600 had about three and a bisected times the alarm acceleration of the 6600, but ran decidedly faster due to added abstruse innovations.

Cray larboard CDC in 1972 to anatomy his own company.4 Two years afterwards his abandonment CDC delivered the STAR-100 which at 100 megaflops was three times they acceleration of the 7600. Forth with the Texas Instruments ASC, the STAR-100 was one of the aboriginal machines to use agent processing - the abstraction accepting been aggressive about 1964 by the APL programming language.78ould be completed.9enchmark in 1996; eventually extensive 2 teraflops.21

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