History of Supercomputing timeline

The history of CPUs is an extremely interesting part of computer history. The first CPUs that I worded on (Minsk-2) had no index registers and to organize a loop one needed to modify instructions -- an interesting proof of flexibility of the Fon Neuman machine architecture.

One of the rare surviving species among early architectures is IBM/360 architecture. The basic design of S/360 was done in late fifties and in a slightly modified form it's still used in current IBM mainframes.

PDP11 and VAX architecture is still interesting as it served a bases for early Unixes and you need to understand it in order to read Lions book. Actually I know about still working PDP11 in some publishing companies in the USA !

Alpha was one of the early 64 bit architectures and it's still in use today.

Nikolai Bezroukov

Sep 1947

A moth (?-1947) makes the mistake of flying into the Harvard Mark II. A whimsical technician makes the logbook entry "first actual case of bug being found", and annotates it by taping down the remains of the moth.

(The term "bug" was of course already in use; that's why it's funny.)

Jun 1948

Newman, Freddie C. Williams, and their team at Manchester University, Manchester, England, complete a prototype machine, the "Mark I" (also called the "Manchester Mark I"). This is the first machine that everyone would call a computer, because it's the first with a true stored-program capability.

It uses a new type of memory developed by F. C. Williams (possibly after an original suggestion by Presper Eckert), which uses the residual charges left on the screen of a CRT after the electron beam has been fired at it. (The bits are read by firing another beam through them and reading the voltage at an electrode beyond the screen.) This is a little unreliable but is fast, and also relatively cheap because it can use existing CRT designs; and it is much more compact than any other memory then existing. The Mark I's main memory of 32 32-bit words occupies a single Williams tube. (Other CRTs on the machine are less densely used: one contains only an accumulator.)

The Mark I's programs are initially entered in binary on a keyboard, and the output is read in binary from another CRT. Later Turing joins the team (see also the "Pilot ACE", below) and devises a primitive form of assembly language, one of several developed at about the same time in different places.

History of Supercomputing timeline

(DOE accomplishments are in italics).
 

A Seymour Cray Perspective by Gordon Bell -- an extremly interesting slides about one of the most important computer architecture pioneers (89 slides). Some interesting notes are reproduced below [ Feb 06, 2002]

Cray was the penultimate "tall, thin man"*. I viewed him as being the greatest computer builder that I knew of as demonstrated by his designs and their successors that operated at the highest performance for over 30 years. He created the class of computers we know as supercomputers.

His influence on computing has been enormous and included: circuitry, packaging, plumbing (the flow of heat and bits), architecture, parallelism, and programming of the compilers to exploit parallelism… and the problems themselves.

... Cray worked at every level of integration from the packaging, circuitry, through the operating system, compiler and applications. Part of his success was his ability and willingness to work at all levels and understand every one of them deeply. He excelled at five P’s: packaging, plumbing, parallelism, programming and understanding the problems or apps.

By plumbing I include both the bits and heat flow. A lot of computing is a plumbing problem: deciding on bit pipes, reservoirs or memories, and interchanges (switches). Are there big enough pipes? And are the reservoirs big enough? After all what is a processor other than just a pump. Memory is a storage tank. Gene Amdahl’s rules state that for every instruction per second you need a byte of memory to hold it and one bit per second of I/O. That carries into Cray’s rule for every flops or floating-point operation per second you need a word of memory for holding the results and two memory accesses of bandwidth!

Cray came to the the University of Minnesota under the WW II G.I. Bill, got a BSEE, then a masters the next in Math. He went to Electronic Research Associates (ERA) and virtually started designing computers and leading and teaching others the day he arrived. He was given the job of designing the control for the ERA1103, a 36-bit scientific computer that Unisys still produces.

He was the chief architect and designer for Univac’s Navy Tactical Data System computer. ERA was bought by Remington-Rand, became part of Univac, and now Unisys. The first merger created the impetus for the ERA founders to form Control Data.

In 1957, when CDC started, Cray put together the “little character”, a six bit computer to test circuits for the first CDC computer, the 160 --- the IO computer for the 1604. So here’s an idea that Cray pioneered: use little computers to do IO for larger computers. The 3600 series followed and held CDC until the 6600 was born in the mid-60s.

The 6600 influenced architecture probably more than any other computer. It was well plumbed in every respect: it had tremendous bandwidth that interconnected all the components. All computer designers would do well to study it.

CDC built a number of compatible versions, including a dual processor. The 7600 was upward compatible and heavily pipelined. It was to be a prelude to the vector processor.

The Cray 1 was the first successful vector processor. Others had tried with the Illiac IV, CDC Star; TI ASC, and IBM array processor. The Cray 1 was extended with various models before Steve Chen extended it in the XMP as a shared memory multiprocessor. This became the new basis for improving speed through parallelism with each new generation.

Shared memory vector multiprocessors became the formula for scientific computing that is likely to continue well into the 21st century.

This has been modified to interconnect vector computers, forming a giant multicomputer network to gain even more parallelism at even higher prices. I don’t know whether Cray Research will continue with the vector architecture but certainly Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi continue to believe it is the future..

Let’s look at his amazing 45 year creative and productive career. He was the undisputed designer of Supercomputers… He created the supercomputer class because he didn’t take cost as a design constraint… the design goal was to build the fastest possible machine.

Many contributions in the form of circuits, packaging, and cooling.

I was influenced by the 160 to create the minicomputer industry. This was a 12 bit computer when the Von Neumann architecture for scientific computing called for long words. UNIVAC said computers had to be decimal because people didn’’t understand binary.

DEC started out with 18 bit computers, and when an application came up that could have been hard wired logic, I said “a tiny computer is a better alternative”. He saw the 160 as an IO computer.

 [Feb 24, 2001] 360/370 architecture overview

History of Computing Information assembled by Mike Muuss the author of ping.

ENIAC The Army-Sponsored Revolution by William T. Moye ARL Historian, January 1996. That might help the public remember that it was the military research which initiated the computer revolution. Few inventions have had as big an impact on our civilization as the computer, and all modern computers are descended from machines build for military needs.

Fifty years ago, the U.S. Army unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) the world's first operational, general purpose, electronic digital computer, developed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. Of the scientific developments spurred by World War II, ENIAC ranks as one of the most influential and pervasive.

The origins of BRL lie in World War I, when pioneering work was done in the Office of the Chief of Ordnance, and especially the Ballistics Branch created within the Office in 1918. In 1938, the activity, known as the Research Division at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), Maryland, was renamed the Ballistic Research Laboratory. In 1985, BRL became part of LABCOM. In the transition to ARL, BRL formed the core of the Weapons Technology Directorate, with computer technology elements migrating to the Advanced Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (now Advanced Simulation and High-Performance Computing Directorate, ASHPC), and vulnerability analysis moving into the Survivability/Lethality Analysis Directorate (SLAD).

The need to speed the calculation and improve the accuracy of the firing and bombing tables constantly pushed the ballisticians at Aberdeen. As early as 1932, personnel in the Ballistic Section had investigated the possible use of a Bush differential analyzer. Finally, arrangements were made for construction, and a machine was installed in 1935 as a Depression-era "relief" project. Shortly thereafter, lab leadership became interested in the possibility of using electrical calculating machines, and members of the staff visited International Business Machines in 1938. Shortage of funds and other difficulties delayed acquisition until 1941, when a tabulator and a multiplier were delivered.

[Apr. 30, 2000] History of Computing It's Not Easy Being Green (or Red) The IBM Stretch Project

The first machine (now officially named the IBM 7030) was delivered to Los Alamos on April 16, 1961. Although far short of being 100 times faster than competing machines, it was accepted and ran for the next ten years, with the then-astonishing average reliability of 17 hours before failure.

While customers were generally happy with the machine's performance, Stretch was considered a failure within IBM for not meeting its speed benchmark—with the consequence that IBM had to reduce the price from $13.5 million to $7.78 million, thus guaranteeing that every machine was built at a loss. Dunwell's star within IBM fell dramatically, and he was given fewer responsibilities—IBM's version of a gulag.

As time went on, however, attitudes within IBM changed about the lessons Stretch had to offer. From a lagging position in industry, IBM had moved into the forefront through the manufacturing, packaging, and architectural innovations Stretch had fostered. Dunwell's exile ended in 1966, when the contributions Stretch had made to the development of other IBM machines—including the monumentally successful System/360 product line—became evident. Dunwell was made an IBM Fellow that year, the company's highest honor.

A Successful Failure

Hundreds of IBM engineers had dramatically pushed the industry forward during the Stretch project, and Stretch alumni went on to contribute to some of the most important technologies still in use today. (One example is John Cocke, originator of the RISC architectural concept). Harwood Kolsky, designer of Stretch's lookahead unit, now emeritus professor at UC Santa Cruz, notes: "In the early 1950s the time was right for a giant step forward in computing. It was technology that pulled the computing field forward... This is where Stretch really stood out. It was an enormous building project that took technologies still wet from the research lab and forced them directly into the fastest computer of its day."

George Michael, a physicist and Stretch user at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, notes that staff were very surprised that Stretch did not crash every twenty minutes. He calls the system "very reliable... it paid for itself in supporting the 1962 nuclear test series at Christmas Island."

The Stretch story is only one of many chapters in the history of computing demonstrating that our industry's triumphs are built upon the ashes of its "failures." Stretch is one of the hallmark machines—despite its being largely invisible to history—that defined the limits of the possible for later generations of computer architects. Looking at a list of Stretch milestones, you may recognize these many innovations in present-day products:

• Multiprogramming
• Memory protection
• Generalized interrupt system
• Pipelining
• Memory interleaving
• Speculative execution
• Lookahead (overlap of memory and arithmetic ops)
• Concept of a memory bus
• Coupling two computers to a single memory
• Large core memory (1MB)
• The eight-bit character (the "byte")
• Variable word length Standard I/O interface

Not heeding the lessons of history, microprocessor companies twenty or thirty years later "re-invented" most of these innovations.