R & D For Supercomputers

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Research and development:

On September 9, 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer to use the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell B.E.) processor aiming to produce a machine capable of a sustained speed of up to 1,000 trillion (one quadrillion) calculations per second, or one PFLOPS. Another project in development by IBM is the Cyclops64 architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip".

Other PFLOP projects include one by Dr. Narendra Karmarkar in India, a CDAC effort targeted for 2010, and the Blue Waters Petascale Computing System funded by the NSF ($200 million) that is being built by the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (slated to be completed by 2011).

Timeline of supercomputers

This is a list of the record-holders for fastest general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the year each one set the record. For entries prior to 1993, this list refers to various sources. From 1993 to 2007, the list reflects the Top500 listing.
Year Supercomputer Peak speed Location
1942 Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) 30 OPS Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
TRE Heath Robinson 200 OPS Bletchley Park
1944 Flowers Colossus 5 kOPS Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, UK
1946
UPenn ENIAC
(before 1948+ modifications) 100 kOPS Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA

1954 IBM NORC 67 kOPS U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, USA
1956 MIT TX-0 83 kOPS Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA
1958 IBM AN/FSQ-7 400 kOPS 25 U.S. Air Force sites across the continental USA and 1 site in Canada (52 computers)
1960 UNIVAC LARC 250 kFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1961 IBM 7030 "Stretch" 1.2 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1964 CDC 6600 3 MFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1969 CDC 7600 36 MFLOPS
1974 CDC STAR-100 100 MFLOPS
1975 Burroughs ILLIAC IV 150 MFLOPS NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA
1976 Cray-1 250 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA (80+ sold worldwide)
1981 CDC Cyber 205 400 MFLOPS (numerous sites worldwide)
1983 Cray X-MP/4 941 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Battelle; Boeing
1984 M-13 2.4 GFLOPS Scientific Research Institute of Computer Complexes, Moscow, USSR
1985 Cray-2/8 3.9 GFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1989 ETA10-G/8 10.3 GFLOPS Florida State University, Florida, USA
1990 NEC SX-3/44R 23.2 GFLOPS NEC Fuchu Plant, Fuchu, Japan
1993 Thinking Machines CM-5/1024 65.5 GFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Security Agency
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 124.50 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
Intel Paragon XP/S 140 143.40 GFLOPS Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994 Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 170.40 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996 Hitachi SR2201/1024 220.4 GFLOPS University of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi/Tsukuba CP-PACS/2048 368.2 GFLOPS Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997 Intel ASCI Red/9152 1.338 TFLOPS Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999 Intel ASCI Red/9632 2.3796 TFLOPS
2000 IBM ASCI White 7.226 TFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002 NEC Earth Simulator 35.86 TFLOPS Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama, Japan
2004 IBM Blue Gene/L 70.72 TFLOPS U.S. Department of Energy/IBM, USA
2005 136.8 TFLOPS U.S. Department of Energy/U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
280.6 TFLOPS
2007 478.2 TFLOPS
2008 TACC Ranger Sun Grid Engine/Constellation 504 TFLOPS[14] Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA