High-performance Computing (HPC) Is Likely to Become Mainstream

By Kevin J. McCarthy Sr.

Until recently, academic and government research centers were the exclusive domains of high-performance computing (HPC) because of the supercomputers' ability to perform sophisticated mathematical modeling. In 1976, the first Cray-1 supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Designed by Seymour Cray, whom many regard as the “father of supercomputing,” the Cray-1 clocked a speed of 160 megaflops, or 160 million floating-point operations (FLOPS) per second. Last year, Cray Inc. installed what was at the time the world's fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab; named “Jaguar,” the XT5 System has a clock speed of 1.8 PetaFLOPs, or 1,800,000,000,000,000 FLOPS per second. This surpassed the IBM “Roadrunner” system, installed in 2008, which was the first computer to pass the PetaFLOP barrier.

Fast-forward to March 2010, when Cray introduced the CX1000, which HPCwire.com described as an “entry-level” or “mid-level” machine designed for “the typical data center environment.”

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