Story last updated at 1:10 p.m. on Tuesday, July 27, 1999
Sci/Tech: Rundown of the biggies
-- Graphic by Larisa Brass
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been home to several generations of
large computers. Here are some of the highlights.
* 1953 -- ORACLE (Oak Ridge Automatic Computer and Logical Engine),
the lab's first computer.
* 1971 -- Digital Equipment PDP-10, ORNL's first time-sharing system.
Researchers could dial into the mainframe and actually type in programs
on a keyboard with a monitor attached. This computer was used extensively
for 20 years.
* 1985 -- The Cray X-MP was installed at K-25. The fastest in the
world at the time, it is considered to be Oak Ridge's first official
"supercomputer." Still, it operated no more quickly than today's high-end
* By 1990 -- More than 5,000 personal computers and workstations
had been installed at ORNL for scientific research and administrative
* 1992 -- ORNL acquired its first "massively parallel" supercomputer,
an Intel Paragon. With 512 processors, the Paragon performed at 35
gigaflops, or 35 billion operations per second, and had 16 gigabytes of
* 1995 -- ORNL bought another Paragon, four times faster, with 70
gigabytes of memory.
* 1999 -- The IBM RS/6000 SP replaced the Paragons in April. Now,
the supercomputer operates at 100 billion gigaflops and has 65 gigabytes
of memory. By next summer it will be upgraded to 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion
operations per second, and have over 300 gigabytes of memory. Potentially,
says Bland, the IBM could be upgraded to operate at 3 or 5 teraflop.
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