There was an age in which human employees engaged to make calculations were called computers. In that age every new computing machine was a high performance "computer", either for its performance compared to the one of humans, either for its prohibitive cost.
| 1822 | Babbage exhibit a small working model of his Difference Engine |
| 1935 | at Cambridge University A.Turing conceives the "universal Turing machine" |
| 1941 | K.Zuse first working general-purpose program-controlled electromechanical digital computer (Z3) |
| 1943, December | installation of Colossus I, first electronic digital computer, designed and built by Flowers, used by Bletchley Park cryptanalysts |
| 1945 | ENIAC, first electronic digital computer in the U.S.A., constructed by P.Eckert and J.Mauchly at University of Pennsylvania |
| 1950 | first execution of a program by a small pilot model of ACE, Automatic Computing Engine designed by A.Turing and built at Manchester University. Pilot Model ACE wich operated at a speed of 1MHz, was the fastest computer in the world for some years. |
| 1951, February | first commercial available computer, Ferranti Mark I, installed at Manchester University |
Here is a brief table with the main events in high performance computing history.
| 1960s | Seymour Cray designed the CDC 6600 series |
| 1972 | Seymour Cray started the `Cray Research Inc.' |
| 1974 | delivery of CDC Star 100 |
| 1976 | delivery of Cray 1 to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. |
| 1982 | CDC Cyber 205 |
| 1982 | delivery of Cray X-MP with 2 processors, designed by Steve Chen |
| 1982 | Steve Wallach starts Convex |
| 1984 | delivery of Cray X-MP with 4 processors, Peak Performance of 1 GFlop/s |
| 1984 | UNICOS, a standard UNIX operating system, available for all Cray systems |
| 1985 | delivery of Cray 2 with 4 processors, peak performance of almost 2 GFlop/s. |
| 1985 | delivery of Convex C1 |
| 1985 | delivery of CM-1 by TMC |
| 1985 | delivery of iPSC/1 by Intel |
| 1985 | introduction of nCube/10 system by nCube |
| 1987 | delivery of ETA10 with 8 processors |
| 1987 | delivery of CM-2 by TMC |
| 1988 | delivery of Cray Y-MP with 8 processors; ECL chip technology |
| 1988 | delivery of Convex C2 |
| 1990 | delivery of MP-1, a 4-bit processors by MasPar |
| 1990 | delivery of iPSC/860 by Intel, based on the i860 chip |
| 1990 | introduction of nCube/2 by nCube |
| 1990 | introduction of VP2600 vector single processor machine by Fujitsu |
| 1990 | introduction of SX-3 by NEC |
| 1991 | delivery of Cray C-90 with 16 processors |
| 1991 | installation of KSR1 by Kendall Square Research (KSR) |
| 1991 | delivery of Touchstone Delta system to Caltech by Intel |
| 1991 | introduction of Convex C3 series |
| 1992 | delivery of Cray 3, designed by Seymour Cray |
| 1992 | production of Paragon/XP series by Intel |
| 1992 | delivery of MP-2 by MasPar |
| 1992 | delivery of CM-5 by TMC |
| 1993 | starting of the TOP500 project |
| 1993 | build of IBM SP1, based on RS6000 processors |
| 1993 | installation of Cray T3D by Cray Research |
| 1994 | build of IBM SP2 |
| 1994 | introduction of SPP1000 series by Convex |
| 1994 | Introduction of Convex C4 series |
| 1994 | introduction of VPP500, CMOS based vector system by Fujitsu |
| 1994 | first announcement of SX-4 by NEC |
| 1994 | introduction of Power-Challenge from SGI |
| 1995 | introduction of SPP1200 series by Convex |
| 1995 | introduction of T-90 Triton by Cray Research |
| 1996 | introduction of SPP1600 series by Convex |
| 1996 | introduction of T3E system series from Cray |
| 1996 | first announcement of Origin2000 series by SGI |
| 1996 | first announcement of SR2201 by Hitachi |
| 1997 | introduction of SPP2000 series by Convex |
| 1997 | delivery of the ASCI Red system at Sandia National Laboratory |
| 1997 | Introduction of the Alpha Server Cluster by Digital |
| 1997 | Introduction of Sun HPC 10000 series |
| 1998 | Compaq acquires Digital |
| 1999 | delivery of SX-5 from NEC |
| 1999 | delivery of SV1 from SGI, vector machine, CMOS based |
| 1999 | delivery of Fujitsu VPP5000 |
"A brief history of Computing", Jack Copeland, June 2000
Parallel Computing 25 (1999) pagg. 1517-1544 - "The marketplace of high-performance computing", Erich Strohmaier, Jack J. Dongarra, Hans W. Meuer, Horst D. Simon, Received 28 July 1999
"Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", Second Edition, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, 1995, ISBN 1-55860-329-8
"Control Data STAR-100 processor design.", R. Hintz and D. Tate., In COMPCON '72, Boston, MA, Sept. 1972.
"Il calcolatore universale", Martin Davis, Adelphi, Milano, 2003, ISBN
88-459-1792-4
Edited by: Maurizio Cremonesi
Last
modified: September 8, 2004