The term "supercomputer" was first applied to the CDC 6600. The term generally referred to the speed at which a computer could perform floating point operations. The normal measure of computing speeds was floating point operations per second, or FLOPS. The reason for this is that supercomputers were normally designed to work in scientific and engineering applications which solved problems requiring large amounts of floating point arithmetic.
Although CDC was formed in 1957 and received...
The term "supercomputer" was first applied to the CDC 6600. The term generally referred to the speed at which a computer could perform floating point operations. The normal measure of computing speeds was floating point operations per second, or FLOPS. The reason for this is that supercomputers were normally designed to work in scientific and engineering applications which solved problems requiring large amounts of floating point arithmetic.
Although CDC was formed in 1957 and received its first order for a computer in 1958, its earlier models, such as the 1604, 160, and 3600 were not considered supercomputers.
Seymour Cray was the person who designed the CDC 6600, which was nearly 10 times faster than its competitors. Its advantages came from the hardware innovation of silicon transistors and also from a system design which offloaded many input/output functions to peripheral processors. It also had a very efficient architecture with multiple registers and an instruction stack, allowing programmers to write highly optimized code.
In 1972, Cray left CDC to form Cray Research, which produced the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976.
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