The legacy of supercomputing can be traced back 50 years or more. In the early 1950s, IBM built their first scientific computer, the IBM 701. The IBM 704 and other high-end systems appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, but by today's standards, these early machines were little more than oversized calculators.

IBM 704 at Lawrence Livermore (October 1956), image courtesy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [source: "www.llnl.gov/llnl/06news/NewsMedia/historical.html" (offline)]

In the 1970s and 1980s, computers known as vector machines from companies like Control Data Corporation (CDC) and Cray officially established the supercomputing market. These systems were used for high-performance computing applications, both military and commercial. Gradually over time, supercomputers began to incorporate multiple processors and processor interconnects (dedicated networks connecting the processors).

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, experimentation and innovation in supercomputer network architectures flourished. Intel, Sequent, Thinking Machines, and other vendors developed commercial products designed to address high-performance computing problems like climate modeling. These products grew to support dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of processors joined by increasingly more advanced interconnects.

IBM re-emerged as a leader in supercomputing research and development in the mid-1990s, creating several systems for the U.S. Government's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). These computers boast approximately 100 times as much computational power as supercomputers of just ten years ago.

Why Supercomputers?

Supercomputers are so expensive that only large corporations and government and educational institutions can afford them. To the average person, the relevance of supercomputing might seem questionable.

In fact, supercomputers have played an important role for decades in advancing the state-of-the-art in high performance computing and communications. Innovations in communications hardware, network protocols, and network operating systems often arise from supercomputing research and development projects. Furthermore, supercomputers are the only systems in the world capable of solving certain types of important scientific and engineering problems, known as "grand challenge" problems.

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