Seymour Roger Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry."
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, 80 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies and the cooling system.
UNICOS is a range of Unix and after it Linux operating system (OS) variants developed by Cray for its supercomputers. UNICOS is the successor of the Cray Operating System (COS). It provides network clustering and source code compatibility layers for some other Unixes. UNICOS was originally introduced in 1985 with the Cray-2 system and later ported to other Cray models. The original UNICOS was based on UNIX System V Release 2, and had many Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) features added to it.
Computer operating systems (OSes) provide a set of functions needed and used by most application programs on a computer, and the links needed to control and synchronize computer hardware. On the first computers, with no operating system, every program needed the full hardware specification to run correctly and perform standard tasks, and its own drivers for peripheral devices like printers and punched paper card readers. The growing complexity of hardware and application programs eventually made operating systems a necessity for everyday use.
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time. For most of the 1960s, Seymour Cray worked at CDC and developed a series of machines that were the fastest computers in the world by far, until Cray left the company to found Cray Research (CRI) in the 1970s. After several years of losses in the early 1980s, in 1988 CDC started to leave the computer manufacturing business and sell the related parts of the company, a process that was completed in 1992 with the creation of Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining businesses of CDC currently operate as Ceridian.
The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.
Job Control Language (JCL) is a name for scripting languages used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem.
The Heterogeneous Element Processor (HEP) was introduced by Denelcor, Inc. in 1982. The HEP's architect was Burton Smith. The machine was designed to solve fluid dynamics problems for the Ballistic Research Laboratory. A HEP system, as the name implies, was pieced together from many heterogeneous components -- processors, data memory modules, and I/O modules. The components were connected via a switched network.
The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray-designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data's dominance of the supercomputer field into the 1970s. The 7600 ran at 36.4 MHz and had a 65 Kword primary memory using magnetic core and variable-size secondary memory. It was generally about ten times as fast as the CDC 6600 and could deliver about 10 MFLOPS on hand-compiled code, with a peak of 36 MFLOPS. In addition, in benchmark tests in early 1970 it was shown to be slightly faster than its IBM rival, the IBM System/360, Model 195. When the system was released in 1967, it sold for around $5 million in base configurations, and considerably more as options and features were added.
The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. They were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. The lineup also included the Cyber 18 and Cyber 1000 minicomputers. Like their predecessor, the CDC 6600, they were unusual in using the ones' complement binary representation.
The CDC 8600 was the last of Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs while he worked for Control Data Corporation. As the natural successor to the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the 8600 was intended to be about 10 times as fast as the 7600, already the fastest computer on the market. The design was essentially four 7600's, packed into a very small chassis so they could run at higher clock speeds.
The Cray Time Sharing System, also known in the Cray user community as CTSS, was developed as an operating system for the Cray-1 or Cray X-MP line of supercomputers in 1978. CTSS was developed by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. CTSS was popular with Cray sites in the United States Department of Energy (DOE), but was used by several other Cray sites, such as the San Diego Supercomputing Center.
The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapid and efficient for their time. Each is a large, solid-state, general-purpose, digital computer that performs scientific and business data processing as well as multiprogramming, multiprocessing, Remote Job Entry, time-sharing, and data management tasks under the control of the operating system called SCOPE. By 1970 there also was a time-sharing oriented operating system named KRONOS. They were part of the first generation of supercomputers. The 6600 was the flagship of Control Data's 6000 series.
The Network Livermore Timesharing System is an operating system that was actively developed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory from 1979 until about 1988, though it continued to run production applications until 1995. An earlier system, the Livermore Time Sharing System had been developed over a decade earlier.
The CDC 160 series was a series of minicomputers built by Control Data Corporation. The CDC 160 and CDC 160-A were 12-bit minicomputers built from 1960 to 1965; the CDC 160G was a 13-bit minicomputer, with an extended version of the CDC 160-A instruction set, and a compatibility mode in which it did not use the 13th bit. The 160 was designed by Seymour Cray - reportedly over a long three-day weekend. It fit into the desk where its operator sat.
The CDC 1700 was a 16-bit word minicomputer, manufactured by the Control Data Corporation with deliveries beginning in May 1966.
VS/9 is a computer operating system for the UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes, used during the late 1960s through 1980s. The 90/60 and 90/70 were repackaged Univac 9700 computers. After the RCA acquisition by Sperry, it was determined that the RCA TSOS operating system was far more advanced than the Univac counterpart, so the company opted to merge the Univac hardware with the RCA software and introduced the 90/70. The 90/60 was introduced shortly thereafter as a slower, less expensive 90/70. It was not until the introduction of the 90/80 that VS/9 finally had a hardware platform optimized to take full advantage of its capability to allow both interactive and batch operations on the same computer.
An asymmetric multiprocessing system is a multiprocessor computer system where not all of the multiple interconnected central processing units (CPUs) are treated equally. For example, a system might allow only one CPU to execute operating system code or might allow only one CPU to perform I/O operations. Other AMP systems might allow any CPU to execute operating system code and perform I/O operations, so that they were symmetric with regard to processor roles, but attached some or all peripherals to particular CPUs, so that they were asymmetric with respect to the peripheral attachment.
The term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, the IBM 7030 Stretch, and the Manchester Atlas, both in 1962—all of which were of comparable power; and the 1954 IBM NORC.
A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been moving away from in-house operating systems and toward some form of Linux, with it running all the supercomputers on the TOP500 list in November 2017. In 2021, top 10 computers run for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), or some variant of it or other Linux distribution e.g. Ubuntu.
