Supercomputers
introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data
Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his
own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his
new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for 5 years (1985-1990). Cray,
himself, never used the word "supercomputer," a little-remembered fact
in that he only recognized the word "computer." In the 1980s a large
number of smaller competitors entered the market, in a parallel to the creation
of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in
the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". Today, supercomputers are
typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies
such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their
experience, although Cray Inc. still specializes in building supercomputers.SD2000
uses PARAM 10000.
It used up to 4 UltraSPARC-II processors. The PARAM systems
can be extended to a cluster supercomputer. A clustered system with 1200 processors
can deliver a peak performance of up to 1TFlops/s. Even though PARAM 10000 system
is not ranked within top 500 supercomputers, it has a possibility of gaining a
high rank. It uses a variation of MPI developed in CDAC. No performance data is
available, although one would presume that it will not be very different from
that of other UltraSPARC-II based systems using MPI. Because SD2000 is a commercial
product, it is impossible to gather detailed data about algorithm and performance
of the product.
