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The Cray-2 ; world's fastest computer 19851990. A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction. The first supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), which led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, all in all holding the top spot in supercomputing for 25 years (19651990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in a parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". Today, supercomputers are typically one-off custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience, although Cray Inc. still specializes in building supercomputers.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's also-ran, as can be seen from the world's first (non solid state) digital programmable electronic computer Colossus, used to break some German ciphers in World War II. CDC's early machines were simply very fast single processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at lower price points to enter the market. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of simple CPUs; some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" RISCThis article is about the computer architecture. For other uses see: RISC (disambiguation Reduced (or regular instruction set computer (or Computing RISC is a computer CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all ta microprocessors, such as the PowerPCPowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple- IBM- Motorola alliance, known as AIM''. The PowerPC was the CPU portion of the overall AIM platform, and is the only part to exist to date. History The history of the PowerPC begins or PA-RISC.
Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIAPI redirects here. Alternative meanings in API (disambiguation). Unified Modeling Language notation An application programming interface (API is a set of definitions of the ways in which one piece of computer software communicates with another. It is a ms such as MPIThe Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a computer communications protocol. It is a de facto standard for communication among the nodes running a parallel program on a distributed memory system. MPI is a library of routines that can be called from Fortran, and PVMThe Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. PVM was developed by the University of Tennessee and open source-based software solutions such as Beowulf and openMosix which facilitate the creation of a sort of "virtual supercomputer" from a collection of ordinary workstations or servers. Technology like Rendezvous pave the way for the creation of ad hoc computer clusters. An example of this is the distributed rendering function in Apple's Shake compositing application. Computers running the Shake software merely need to be in proximity to each other, in networking terms, to automatically discover and use each other's resources. While no one has yet built an ad hoc computer cluster that rivals even yesteryear's supercomputers, the line between desktop, or even laptop, and supercomputer is beginning to blur, and is likely to continue to blur as built-in support for parallelism and distributed processing increases in mainstream desktop operating systems. An easy programming language for Supercomputers remains an open research topic in Computer Science.