Grosch's law is the following observation of computer performance, made by Herb Grosch in 1953: [1]
I believe that there is a fundamental rule, which I modestly call Grosch's law, giving added economy only as the square root of the increase in speed — that is, to do a calculation ten times as cheaply you must do it hundred times as fast.
This adage is more commonly stated as
Computer performance increases as the square of the cost. If computer A costs twice as much as computer B, you should expect computer A to be four times as fast as computer B. [2]
Two years before Grosch's statement, Seymour Cray was quoted in Business Week (August 1963) expressing this very same thought:
Computers should obey a square law — when the price doubles, you should get at least four times as much speed. [3]
The law can also be interpreted as meaning that computers present economies of scale: the more costly is the computer, the price–performance ratio linearly becomes better. This implies that low-cost computers cannot compete in the market.
An analysis of rental cost/performance data for computers between 1951 and 1963 by Kenneth E. Knight found that Grosch's law held for commercial and scientific operations [4] (a modern analysis of the same data found that Grosch's law only applied to commercial operations [5] ). In a separate study, Knight found that Grosch's law did not apply to computers between 1963-1967 [6] (also confirmed by the aforementioned modern analysis [5] ).
Paul Strassmann asserted in 1997, that "it was never clear whether Grosch's Law was a reflection of how IBM priced its computers or whether it related to actual costs. It provided the rationale that a bigger computer is always better. The IBM sales force used Grosch's rationale to persuade organizations to acquire more computing capacity than they needed. Grosch's Law also became the justification for offering time-sharing services from big data centers as a substitute for distributed computing." [7] Grosch himself has stated that the law was more useful in the 1960s and 1970s than it is today. He originally intended the law to be a "means for pricing computing services". [8]
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.
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."
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
In computer science, algorithmic efficiency is a property of an algorithm which relates to the amount of computational resources used by the algorithm. Algorithmic efficiency can be thought of as analogous to engineering productivity for a repeating or continuous process.
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964.
Datamation is a computer magazine that was published in print form in the United States between 1957 and 1998, and has since continued publication on the web. Datamation was previously owned by QuinStreet and acquired by TechnologyAdvice in 2020. Datamation is published as an online magazine at Datamation.com.
Minisupercomputers constituted a short-lived class of computers that emerged in the mid-1980s, characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing. As scientific computing using vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created an opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market. As a generalization, the price targets for these smaller computers were one-tenth of the larger supercomputers.
Commodity computing involves the use of large numbers of already-available computing components for parallel computing, to get the greatest amount of useful computation at low cost. It is computing done in commodity computers as opposed to in high-cost superminicomputers or in boutique computers. Commodity computers are computer systems - manufactured by multiple vendors - incorporating components based on open standards.
Herbert Reuben John Grosch was an early computer scientist, perhaps best known for Grosch's law, which he formulated in 1950. Grosch's Law is an aphorism that states "economy is as the square root of the speed."
International Business Machines (IBM) is a multinational corporation specializing in computer technology and information technology consulting. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, the company originated from the amalgamation of various enterprises dedicated to automating routine business transactions, notably pioneering punched card-based data tabulating machines and time clocks. In 1911, these entities were unified under the umbrella of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).
The history of general-purpose CPUs is a continuation of the earlier history of computing hardware.
The ACS-1 and ACS-360 are two related supercomputers designed by IBM as part of the Advanced Computing Systems project from 1961 to 1969. Although the designs were never finished and no models ever went into production, the project spawned a number of organizational techniques and architectural innovations that have since become incorporated into nearly all high-performance computers in existence today. Many of the ideas resulting from the project directly influenced the development of the IBM RS/6000 and, more recently, have contributed to the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) computing paradigm used by Intel and HP in the Itanium processors.
In computer science and computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation.
The term is used for two different things:
An Internet area network (IAN) is a concept for a communications network that connects voice and data endpoints within a cloud environment over IP, replacing an existing local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN) or the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
DOME is a Dutch government-funded project between IBM and ASTRON in form of a public-private-partnership focussing on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest planned radio telescope. SKA will be built in Australia and South Africa. The DOME project objective is technology roadmap development that applies both to SKA and IBM. The 5-year project was started in 2012 and is co-funded by the Dutch government and IBM Research in Zürich, Switzerland and ASTRON in the Netherlands. The project ended officially on 30 September 2017.