Название: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes
Автор: Boelie Elzen, Donald Mackenzie
Издательство: ACM Books
Год: 2025
Страниц: 288
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB
This book describes the development and use of supercomputers in the period 1960-1996, a time that can be called the Seymour Cray Era. For more than three decades, Cray's computer designs were seen as the yardstick against which all other efforts were measured. Initially, this yardstick was sheer computing speed. However, the supercomputer world gradually became more complex and other factors became equally important. The initial development of supercomputers was commissioned and financed by the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, which had huge computational needs in connection with nuclear weapons development. The computers designed by Cray satisfied those needs, while these computers were also sold to a few dozen other big research organizations and weather agencies. From the 1980s, a variety of companies started to compete with the Cray designs by offering supercomputers that used a new architectural approach, MPP: massively parallel processing. This new architecture, based on using tens of thousands of relatively simple microprocessors, subsequently began to dominate high-performance computing and marked the end of the Seymour Cray Era.