The CDC 6000 series was designed by Seymour Cray.
.How do you decide who gets priority on your computer?
new 6000 SERIES Systems make “priority” a thing of the past
YOU CAN MAKE EVERYBODY “FIRST IN LINE” — because the new CONTROL DATA® Series 6000 Systems do things differently than any other computers available today. Their massive memory and incredible speed allow simultaneous access by a number of different users with different programs.
When reading this, keep in mind that a single AMD 6990 Graphics Card which is available for $700 is capable of over 5 teraFlOPS.
Also, Philip Elmer-De Witt still writes about technology.
And apparently Seymour Cray was so bad-ass he played Minecraft for real.
.Fast and Smart – Designers race to build the supercomputers of the future
The computer at the University of Illinois is simulating something that no one saw: the evolution of the universe in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Re-creating conditions that may have prevailed billions of years ago, the computer reveals on a remote screen how massive clouds of subatomic particles, tugged by their own gravity, might have coalesced into filaments and flattened disks. The vivid reds, greens and blues of the shapes are not merely decorative but represent the various densities of the first large structures as they emerged from primordial chaos in the near vacuum of space.
Cool article and review about the Cray-1 the first really high end production supercomputer.
It cost $8 million and performed at blistering 80 MFLOP/s. For comparison, a Pentium 4 2.8ghz can hit about 2.5 GFLOP/s or about 31 times faster. The current supercomputer champ can handle 280 TFLOP/s or about 350,000 times faster.
.Supercomputer
Incredible Cray-1 cruises at 80 million operations a second
It’s 10 times faster than the biggest IBM, with six times more memory
By JIM SCHEFTER
“Step into the computer,” said my guide.
I did, and felt the chilling sensation of moving into the megabit maw of a machine so advanced in electronic intellect that it can only talk to other machines.
