VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE The 30th Anniversary of the Supercomputing Conference: Bringing the Future Closer— Supercomputing upercomputing’s nascent era was borne of the late History and the 1940s and 1950s Cold War and increasing tensions be- Stween the East and the West; the first installations—which demanded ex- Immortality of Now tensive resources and manpower beyond what private corporations Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, could provide—were housed in and University of Manchester university and government labs in Vladimir Getov, University of Westminster the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Following the Kevin Walsh, University of California, San Diego Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) stored program computer architec- A panel of experts discusses historical ture, these so-called von Neumann machines were implemented as the reflections on the past 30 years of the MANIAC at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, the Atlas at the Univer- Supercomputing (SC) conference, its leading sity of Manchester, the ILLIAC at role for the professional community and some the University of Illinois, the BESM machines at the Soviet Academy of exciting future challenges. Sciences, the Johnniac at The Rand Corporation, and the SILLIAC in Australia. By 1955, private industry 74 COMPUTER PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 0018-9162/18/$33.00 © 2018 IEEE joined in to support these initiatives and the IBM User Group, SHARE was formed, the Digital Equipment Corpo- MACHINES OF THE FUTURE ration was founded in 1957, while IBM built an early wide area computer net- “The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and work SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more. Moreover, they will be Environment), and the RCA 501, using far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be all transistor logic was launched in adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card 1958. or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the in- In 1988, the first IEEE/ACM SC con- structions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at ference in Kissimmee, Florida, was exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily held. At that time, custom-built vec- available for distribution or for later further manipulation.” tor mainframes were the norm; the —“As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush (The Atlantic, July 1945) Cray Y-MP was a leading machine of the day, with a peak performance of 333 Mflops per processor and could be equipped with up the eight processors; users typically accessed the machine HPC over the past 30 years, we have computers. Doing everything known over a dumb terminal at 9600 baud; invited 6 well-known experts—Gordon to be feasible for performance (for there was no visualization; a single Bell, Jack Dongarra, Bill Johnston, example, parallel units, lookahead, programmer would code and develop Horst Simon, Erich Strohmaier, and speculative execution). In pre-SC88, everything; and there were few tools Mateo Valero—all of whom offer com- there were trials and failures, such as or software libraries, and we relied on plimentary perspectives on the past violations of Amdahl’s Law1 by Single remote batch job submission. three to four decades of supercom- Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) and Today, as we approach SC’s 30th an- puting. Their histories connect us in other architectures or pushing tech- niversary, late commodity massively community. nology that failed to reach a critical parallel platforms are the norm. The production (such as GaAs). At the be- HPC community has developed par- COMPUTER: Looking back at the early ginning of the first generation of com- allel debuggers and rich tool sets for years of electronic digital computers, mercial computing, Seymour Cray code share and reuse. Remote access what do you see as the turning points joined Control Data Corporation as a to several supercomputers at once is and defining eras of supercomputing founder and quickly demonstrated made possible by scientific gateways, that help chronicle the growth of the a proclivity for building the highest accessed over 10 and 100 Gbps net- HPC community and the SC confer- performance computer of the day; in works. High performance desktops ence at its 30th anniversary? essence, he defined and established with scientific visualization capabil- the tri-decade of supercomputing and ities are the chief methods we use to GORDON BELL: In 1961, after I vis- the market. cognitively grasp the quantity of data ited Lawrence Livermore National After the initial CDC 1604 (1960) produced by supercomputers. The Cold Laboratory with the Univac LARC, introduction, Seymour proceeded to War arms race has been eclipsed by an and Manchester University with the build computers without peer, includ- HPC race, and we are living through a Atlas prototype, I began to see what ing the CDC 6600 in 1965, and CDC radical refactoring of the time it takes supercomputing was about from a de- 7600 in 1969. He then formed Cray Re- to create new knowledge—and, con- sign and user perspective—namely, it search to introduce the vector proces- currently, the time it takes to learn was designing at the edge of the fea- sor Cray 1 (1976), which was followed how much we don’t know. The IEEE/ sibility envelope using every known by the multiprocessor Cray SMP (1985), ACM SC conference animates the technique. YMP (1988), and last C90 (1991). From community and allows us to see what The IBM Stretch was one of these 1965 through 1991, the Cray architec- knowledge changes, and what knowl- three 1960s computers aimed to tures defined and dominated computer edge stays stable over time. achieve over an order of magni- design and the market, which included To review and summarize the key tude performance increase over the CDC, Cray Research, Fujitsu, Hitachi, developments and achievements of largest, commercial state-of-the-art IBM, and NEC. OCTOBER 2018 75 VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE MATEO VALERO: I see the rise, fall, the 500 largest installations and some market. A new criterion for determin- and resurgence of vector processors as of their main system characteristics ing which systems could be counted the turning points of supercomputing. are published twice a year. Its simplic- as supercomputers was needed. After Vector processors execute instructions ity has invited many critics but has two years of experimentation with whose operands are complete vectors. also allowed it to remain useful during various metrics and approaches, Hans This simple idea was so revolution- the advent and reigns of giga-, tera-, W. Meuer and I convinced ourselves ary, and the implementations were so and petascale computing. Systems are that the best long-term solution was efficient that the resulting vector -su ranked by their performance of the to maintain a list of systems in ques- percomputers reigned supreme as the Linpack benchmark,3 which solves a tion, ranking them based on the ac- fastest computers in the world from dense system of linear equations. Over tual performance the system had 1975 to 1995. Vector processors exploit time, the data collected allowed early achieved when running the Linpack data-level parallelism elegantly, they identification and quantification of benchmark. Based on our previous could hide memory latency very well, many trends related to computer ar- market studies we were confident that and they are energy efficient since they chitectures used in HPC.4,5 we could assemble a list of at least 500 did not need to fetch and decode as systems that we had previously con- many instructions. After some early COMPUTER: How was the Linpack sidered supercomputers. This deter- prototypes, the vector supercomputing benchmark selected as a measure for the mined our cutoff. era started with Seymour Cray and his TOP500 ranking of supercomputers? Cray 1.2 The company continued with COMPUTER: There were other drivers Cray 2, Cray X-MP, and Cray T90, and fi- ERICH STROHMAIER: In the mid- beyond Cold War competition by the nalized with the Cray X1 and X1E. Cray 1980s, Hans W. Meuer started a small late 1970s and early 1980s, including Research was building vector proces- and focused annual conference series the revolution in personal computing. sors for 30 years. The implementation about supercomputing, which soon What events spurred the funding of was very efficient partially due to the evolved to become the International supercomputing in particular? radical technologies that were used Supercomputing Conference (www at the time such as transistor-based .isc-hpc.com). During the opening ses- BELL: In 1982, Japan’s Ministry of memory instead of magnetic-core sions of these conferences, he used to Trade and Industry established the and extra fast Emitter-Coupled Logic present statistics collected from ven- Fifth Generation Computer Systems (ECL) instead of CMOS, which enabled dors and colleagues about the num- research program to create an AI com- a very high clock rate. This landscape bers, locations, and manufacturers of puter. This stimulated DARPA’s de- was soon made more heterogeneous supercomputers worldwide. Initially, cade-long Strategic Computing Initia- with the vector supercomputer imple- it was relatively obvious which sys- tive (SCI) in 1983 to advance computer mentations from Japan from Hitachi, tems should be considered as super- hardware and artificial intelligence. NEC, and Fujitsu. The vector supercom- computers. This label was reserved for SCI funded a number of designs, in- puters introduced many innovations, vector processing systems from com- cluding Thinking Machines, which from using massively multi-banked panies such as Cray, CDC, Fujitsu, NEC, was a key demonstration for displacing high-bandwidth memory systems, to and Hitachi, which competed in the transactional memory supercomput- multiprocessors with fast processor market and each claimed theirs had ers.