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109-468: Science Research Associates Inc. was founded in 1938 with a trade and occupational focus. In 1957, it moved into individualized classroom instruction with the iconic SRA Reading Laboratory Kit, a format that they translated to mathematics, science, and social studies commonly called SRA cards . The labs were large boxes filled with color-coded cardboard sheets, and each sheet included a reading exercise for students. Each student would work on it independently of

218-506: A massively parallel processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors , including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors . It was mainly used for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics . Fujitsu's VPP500 from 1992 is unusual since, to achieve higher speeds, its processors used GaAs , a material normally reserved for microwave applications due to its toxicity. Fujitsu 's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain

327-575: A neuromorphic CMOS integrated circuit and announced a $ 3 billion investment over the following five years to design a neural chip that mimics the human brain, with 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, but that uses just 1 kilowatt of power. In 2016, the company launched all-flash arrays designed for small and midsized companies, which includes software for data compression, provisioning, and snapshots across various systems. In January 2019, IBM introduced its first commercial quantum computer: IBM Q System One . In March 2020, it

436-649: A Hollerith department called Hollerith Abteilung, which had IBM machines, including calculating and sorting machines. IBM as a military contractor produced 6% of the M1 Carbine rifles used in World War II, about 346,500 of them, between August 1943 and May. IBM built the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator , an electromechanical computer, during World War II. It offered its first commercial stored-program computer,

545-586: A computer 100 times faster than any existing computer. The IBM 7030 used transistors , magnetic core memory, pipelined instructions, prefetched data through a memory controller and included pioneering random access disk drives. The IBM 7030 was completed in 1961 and despite not meeting the challenge of a hundredfold increase in performance, it was purchased by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Customers in England and France also bought

654-581: A consequence, IBM quickly began losing its market dominance to emerging competitors in the PC market. In 1985, IBM collaborated with Microsoft to develop a new operating system , which was released as OS/2 . Following a dispute, Microsoft severed the collaboration and IBM continued development of OS/2 on its own but it failed in the marketplace against Microsoft's Windows during the mid-1990s. In 1991 IBM began spinning off its many divisions into autonomous subsidiaries (so-called "Baby Blues") in an attempt to make

763-677: A fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton , New York; Dayton, Ohio ; Detroit, Michigan ; Washington, D.C. ; and Toronto , Canada. Collectively, the companies manufactured a wide array of machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. , fired from

872-447: A focus on customer service, an insistence on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen and had an evangelical fervor for instilling company pride and loyalty in every worker". His favorite slogan, " THINK ", became a mantra for each company's employees. During Watson's first four years, revenues reached $ 9 million ($ 158 million today) and the company's operations expanded to Europe, South America, Asia and Australia. Watson never liked

981-457: A high performance I/O system to achieve high levels of performance. Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the TOP500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is a widely cited current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time. This is a list of the computers which appeared at

1090-659: A larger system such as a full Linux distribution on server and I/O nodes. While in a traditional multi-user computer system job scheduling is, in effect, a tasking problem for processing and peripheral resources, in a massively parallel system, the job management system needs to manage the allocation of both computational and communication resources, as well as gracefully deal with inevitable hardware failures when tens of thousands of processors are present. Although most modern supercomputers use Linux -based operating systems, each manufacturer has its own specific Linux distribution, and no industry standard exists, partly due to

1199-499: A lot of capacity but are not typically considered supercomputers, given that they do not solve a single very complex problem. In general, the speed of supercomputers is measured and benchmarked in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second), and not in terms of MIPS (million instructions per second), as is the case with general-purpose computers. These measurements are commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera- , combined into

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1308-472: A processing power of over 166 petaFLOPS through over 762 thousand active Computers (Hosts) on the network. As of October 2016 , Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search 's (GIMPS) distributed Mersenne Prime search achieved about 0.313 PFLOPS through over 1.3 million computers. The PrimeNet server has supported GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest volunteer computing projects, since 1997. Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing

1417-626: A separate lawsuit. In 2015, IBM bought the digital part of The Weather Company , Truven Health Analytics for $ 2.6 billion in 2016, and in October 2018, IBM announced its intention to acquire Red Hat for $ 34 billion, which was completed on July 9, 2019. In February 2020, IBM's John Kelly III joined Brad Smith of Microsoft to sign a pledge with the Vatican to ensure the ethical use and practice of Artificial Intelligence (AI) . IBM announced in October 2020 that it would divest

1526-411: A series of standardized tests sold to schools as a method of testing students' likelihood of qualifying for college. SRA produced both IBM PC and Apple II software in the 1980s. Maxwell Communication Corporation bought SRA in 1988, and it became part of Macmillan/McGraw-Hill in 1989. Maxwell Communications collapsed, and McGraw-Hill acquired full ownership of Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and SRA. Since

1635-480: A sharp drop in profit margins during the second quarter of fiscal year 1992; market analysts attributed the drop to a fierce price war in the personal computer market over the summer of 1992. The corporate restructuring was one of the largest and most expensive in history up to that point. By the summer of 1993, the IBM PC Co. had divided into multiple business units itself, including Ambra Computer Corporation and

1744-483: A single large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can, e.g. a very complex weather simulation application. Capacity computing, in contrast, is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve a few somewhat large problems or many small problems. Architectures that lend themselves to supporting many users for routine everyday tasks may have

1853-411: A supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS ) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 10  FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers . For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10 ) to tens of teraFLOPS (10 ). Since November 2017, all of

1962-511: Is a bare-metal compute model to execute code, but each user is given virtualized login node. POD computing nodes are connected via non-virtualized 10 Gbit/s Ethernet or QDR InfiniBand networks. User connectivity to the POD data center ranges from 50 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. Citing Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, Penguin Computing argues that virtualization of compute nodes

2071-415: Is a form of distributed computing whereby the "super virtual computer" of many networked geographically disperse computers performs computing tasks that demand huge processing power. Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing aims to provide a higher quality of service than opportunistic grid computing by achieving more control over the assignment of tasks to distributed resources and the use of intelligence about

2180-466: Is an emerging direction, e.g. as in the Cyclops64 system. As the price, performance and energy efficiency of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have improved, a number of petaFLOPS supercomputers such as Tianhe-I and Nebulae have started to rely on them. However, other systems such as the K computer continue to use conventional processors such as SPARC -based designs and

2289-737: Is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04  megawatts (MW) of electricity. The cost to power and cool the system can be significant, e.g. 4 MW at $ 0.10/kWh is $ 400 an hour or about $ 3.5 million per year. Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices and affects powerful computer systems in various ways. The thermal design power and CPU power dissipation issues in supercomputing surpass those of traditional computer cooling technologies. The supercomputing awards for green computing reflect this issue. The packing of thousands of processors together inevitably generates significant amounts of heat density that need to be dealt with. The Cray-2

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2398-409: Is not suitable for HPC. Penguin Computing has also criticized that HPC clouds may have allocated computing nodes to customers that are far apart, causing latency that impairs performance for some HPC applications. Supercomputers generally aim for the maximum in capability computing rather than capacity computing. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve

2507-684: Is quite difficult to debug and test parallel programs. Special techniques need to be used for testing and debugging such applications. Opportunistic supercomputing is a form of networked grid computing whereby a "super virtual computer" of many loosely coupled volunteer computing machines performs very large computing tasks. Grid computing has been applied to a number of large-scale embarrassingly parallel problems that require supercomputing performance scales. However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing cannot handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations. The fastest grid computing system

2616-428: Is the volunteer computing project Folding@home (F@h). As of April 2020 , F@h reported 2.5 exaFLOPS of x86 processing power. Of this, over 100 PFLOPS are contributed by clients running on various GPUs, and the rest from various CPU systems. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform hosts a number of volunteer computing projects. As of February 2017 , BOINC recorded

2725-442: Is the highly successful Cray-1 of 1976. Vector computers remained the dominant design into the 1990s. From then until today, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors became the norm. The US has long been the leader in the supercomputer field, first through Cray's almost uninterrupted dominance of the field, and later through a variety of technology companies. Japan made major strides in

2834-440: Is the largest shareholder of IBM and as of March 31, 2023, held 15.7% of total shares outstanding. In 2011, IBM became the first technology company Warren Buffett 's holding company Berkshire Hathaway invested in. Initially he bought 64 million shares costing $ 10.5 billion. Over the years, Buffett increased his IBM holdings, but by the end of 2017 had reduced them by 94.5% to 2.05 million shares; by May 2018, he

2943-556: The Blue Gene system, IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density. The IBM Power 775 , released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling. The IBM Aquasar system uses hot water cooling to achieve energy efficiency, the water being used to heat buildings as well. The energy efficiency of computer systems is generally measured in terms of " FLOPS per watt ". In 2008, Roadrunner by IBM operated at 376  MFLOPS/W . In November 2010,

3052-760: The Blue Gene/Q reached 1,684 MFLOPS/W and in June 2011 the top two spots on the Green 500 list were occupied by Blue Gene machines in New York (one achieving 2097 MFLOPS/W) with the DEGIMA cluster in Nagasaki placing third with 1375 MFLOPS/W. Because copper wires can transfer energy into a supercomputer with much higher power densities than forced air or circulating refrigerants can remove waste heat ,

3161-541: The Connection Machine (CM) that developed from research at MIT . The CM-1 used as many as 65,536 simplified custom microprocessors connected together in a network to share data. Several updated versions followed; the CM-5 supercomputer is a massively parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second. In 1982, Osaka University 's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used

3270-613: The DES cipher . Throughout the decades, the management of heat density has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers. The large amount of heat generated by a system may also have other effects, e.g. reducing the lifetime of other system components. There have been diverse approaches to heat management, from pumping Fluorinert through the system, to a hybrid liquid-air cooling system or air cooling with normal air conditioning temperatures. A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which

3379-574: The FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines and introduced the highly successful Selectric typewriter. In 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flights of the Mercury astronauts. A year later, it moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Armonk, New York. The latter half of

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3488-465: The Goodyear MPP . But by the mid-1990s, general-purpose CPU performance had improved so much in that a supercomputer could be built using them as the individual processing units, instead of using custom chips. By the turn of the 21st century, designs featuring tens of thousands of commodity CPUs were the norm, with later machines adding graphic units to the mix. In 1998, David Bader developed

3597-851: The IBM Rome Software Lab (Rome, Italy), Hursley House (Winchester, UK), 330 North Wabash (Chicago, Illinois, United States), the Cambridge Scientific Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States), the IBM Toronto Software Lab (Toronto, Canada), the IBM Building, Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa), the IBM Building (Seattle) (Seattle, Washington, United States), the IBM Hakozaki Facility (Tokyo, Japan),

3706-888: The IBM Yamato Facility (Yamato, Japan), the IBM Canada Head Office Building (Ontario, Canada) and the Watson IoT Headquarters (Munich, Germany). Defunct IBM campuses include the IBM Somers Office Complex (Somers, New York), Spango Valley (Greenock, Scotland), and Tour Descartes (Paris, France). The company's contributions to industrial architecture and design include works by Marcel Breuer , Eero Saarinen , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , I.M. Pei and Ricardo Legorreta . Van der Rohe's building in Chicago

3815-702: The Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC), today considered among the first supercomputers, for the US Navy Research and Development Center. It still used high-speed drum memory , rather than the newly emerging disk drive technology. Also, among the first supercomputers was the IBM 7030 Stretch . The IBM 7030 was built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory , which then in 1955 had requested

3924-544: The National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson , called on Flint and, in 1914, was offered a position at CTR. Watson joined CTR as general manager and then, 11 months later, was made President when antitrust cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Patterson's pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTR's companies. He implemented sales conventions, "generous sales incentives,

4033-681: The Universal Product Code . IBM and the World Bank first introduced financial swaps to the public in 1981, when they entered into a swap agreement. IBM entered the microcomputer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150), which soon became known as the PC , one of IBM's best selling products. Due to a lack of foresight by IBM, the PC was not well protected by intellectual property laws. As

4142-626: The grid computing approach, the processing power of many computers, organized as distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available. In another approach, many processors are used in proximity to each other, e.g. in a computer cluster . In such a centralized massively parallel system the speed and flexibility of the interconnect becomes very important and modern supercomputers have used various approaches ranging from enhanced Infiniband systems to three-dimensional torus interconnects . The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization

4251-410: The magnetic stripe card that would become ubiquitous for credit/debit/ATM cards, driver's licenses, rapid transit cards and a multitude of other identity and access control applications. IBM pioneered the manufacture of these cards, and for most of the 1970s, the data processing systems and software for such applications ran exclusively on IBM computers. In 1974, IBM engineer George J. Laurer developed

4360-519: The thermal design power of the supercomputer as a whole, the amount that the power and cooling infrastructure can handle, is somewhat more than the expected normal power consumption, but less than the theoretical peak power consumption of the electronic hardware. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, based on the changes in supercomputer architecture . While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed,

4469-541: The trademark IBM ), nicknamed Big Blue , is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average . IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held

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4578-698: The world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux -based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science , and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics , weather forecasting , climate research , oil and gas exploration , molecular modeling (computing

4687-483: The 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe , exemplified by the System/360 , was the world's dominant computing platform , with the company producing 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide. IBM debuted in the microcomputer market in 1981 with the IBM Personal Computer , — its DOS software provided by Microsoft , — which became the basis for the majority of personal computers to

4796-577: The 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, participating in the 1965 Gemini flights, 1966 Saturn flights, and 1969 lunar mission. IBM also developed and manufactured the Saturn V's Instrument Unit and Apollo spacecraft guidance computers. On April 7, 1964, IBM launched the first computer system family, the IBM System/360 . It spanned the complete range of commercial and scientific applications from large to small, allowing companies for

4905-399: The 1960s, SRA has published Direct Instruction programs, also known as DISTAR (Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading). These include Language for Learning, Reading Mastery, Reasoning and Writing, Connecting Math Concepts, and Corrective Reading . SRA acquired Everyday Mathematics and purchased Open Court Reading in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the company

5014-501: The 1970s was the ILLIAC IV . This machine was the first realized example of a true massively parallel computer, in which many processors worked together to solve different parts of a single larger problem. In contrast with the vector systems, which were designed to run a single stream of data as quickly as possible, in this concept, the computer instead feeds separate parts of the data to entirely different processors and then recombines

5123-865: The 21st century. As one of the world's oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations , including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk , the hard disk drive , the magnetic stripe card , the relational database , the SQL programming language , and the UPC barcode . The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips , quantum computing , artificial intelligence , and data infrastructure . IBM employees and alumni have won various recognitions for their scientific research and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards . IBM originated with several technological innovations developed and commercialized in

5232-495: The CDC6600 became the fastest computer in the world. Given that the 6600 outperformed all the other contemporary computers by about 10 times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market, when one hundred computers were sold at $ 8 million each. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, Cray Research . Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, which became one of

5341-490: The IBM PC Co. was dissolved and merged into IBM Personal Systems Group. In 2002 IBM acquired PwC Consulting, the consulting arm of PwC which was merged into its IBM Global Services . On September 14, 2004, LG and IBM announced that their business alliance in the South Korean market would end at the end of that year. Both companies stated that it was unrelated to the charges of bribery earlier that year. Xnote

5450-561: The IBM Power Personal Systems Group, the former an attempt to design and market " clone " computers of IBM's own architecture and the latter responsible for IBM's PowerPC -based workstations . IBM PC Co. introduced the ThinkPad clone computers, which IBM would heavily market and would eventually become one of the best-selling series of notebook computers . In 1993, IBM posted an $ 8 billion loss – at

5559-789: The IBM website. On June 7, Krishna announced that IBM would carry out an "orderly wind-down" of its operations in Russia. In late 2022, IBM started a collaboration with new Japanese manufacturer Rapidus , which led GlobalFoundries to file a lawsuit against IBM the following year. In 2023, IBM acquired Manta Software Inc. to complement its data and A.I. governance capabilities for an undisclosed amount. On November 16, 2023, IBM suspended ads on Twitter after ads were found next to pro-Nazi content. In December 2023, IBM announced it would acquire Software AG 's StreamSets and webMethods platforms for €2.13 billion ($ 2.33 billion). IBM's market capitalization

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5668-551: The Managed Infrastructure Services unit of its Global Technology Services division into a new public company. The new company, Kyndryl , will have 90,000 employees, 4,600 clients in 115 countries, with a backlog of $ 60 billion. IBM's spin off was greater than any of its previous divestitures, and welcomed by investors. IBM appointed Martin Schroeter, who had been IBM's CFO from 2014 through

5777-650: The National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) to ensure interoperability, as none of it had been run on Linux previously. Using the successful prototype design, he led the development of "RoadRunner," the first Linux supercomputer for open use by the national science and engineering community via the National Science Foundation's National Technology Grid. RoadRunner was put into production use in April 1999. At

5886-516: The Weather Channel mobile app. Also that year, IBM employees created the film A Boy and His Atom , which was the first molecule movie to tell a story. In 2016, IBM acquired video conferencing service Ustream and formed a new cloud video unit. In April 2016, it posted a 14-year low in quarterly sales. The following month, Groupon sued IBM accusing it of patent infringement, two months after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in

5995-454: The ability of the cooling systems to remove waste heat is a limiting factor. As of 2015 , many existing supercomputers have more infrastructure capacity than the actual peak demand of the machine – designers generally conservatively design the power and cooling infrastructure to handle more than the theoretical peak electrical power consumed by the supercomputer. Designs for future supercomputers are power-limited –

6104-546: The achievable throughput, derived from the LINPACK benchmarks and shown as "Rmax" in the TOP500 list. The LINPACK benchmark typically performs LU decomposition of a large matrix. The LINPACK performance gives some indication of performance for some real-world problems, but does not necessarily match the processing requirements of many other supercomputer workloads, which for example may require more memory bandwidth, or may require better integer computing performance, or may need

6213-507: The actual core memory of the Atlas was only 16,000 words, with a drum providing memory for a further 96,000 words. The Atlas Supervisor swapped data in the form of pages between the magnetic core and the drum. The Atlas operating system also introduced time-sharing to supercomputing, so that more than one program could be executed on the supercomputer at any one time. Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and Manchester University and

6322-469: The antitrust laws in IBM's actions directed against leasing companies and plug-compatible peripheral manufacturers. Shortly after, IBM unbundled its software and services in what many observers believed was a direct result of the lawsuit, creating a competitive market for software. In 1982, the Department of Justice dropped the case as "without merit". Also in 1969, IBM engineer Forrest Parry invented

6431-424: The attention of high-performance computing (HPC) users and developers in recent years. Cloud computing attempts to provide HPC-as-a-service exactly like other forms of services available in the cloud such as software as a service , platform as a service , and infrastructure as a service . HPC users may benefit from the cloud in different angles such as scalability, resources being on-demand, fast, and inexpensive. On

6540-505: The availability and reliability of individual systems within the supercomputing network. However, quasi-opportunistic distributed execution of demanding parallel computing software in grids should be achieved through the implementation of grid-wise allocation agreements, co-allocation subsystems, communication topology-aware allocation mechanisms, fault tolerant message passing libraries and data pre-conditioning. Cloud computing with its recent and rapid expansions and development have grabbed

6649-601: The city's seventh tallest building and overlooking Beijing National Stadium ("Bird's Nest") , home to the 2008 Summer Olympics . IBM India Private Limited is the Indian subsidiary of IBM, which is headquartered at Bangalore , Karnataka. It has facilities in Coimbatore , Chennai , Kochi , Ahmedabad , Delhi , Kolkata , Mumbai , Pune , Gurugram , Noida , Bhubaneshwar , Surat , Visakhapatnam , Hyderabad , Bangalore and Jamshedpur . Other notable buildings include

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6758-560: The clumsy hyphenated name "Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company" and chose to replace it with the more expansive title "International Business Machines" which had previously been used as the name of CTR's Canadian Division; the name was changed on February 14, 1924. By 1933, most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, IBM. The Nazis made extensive use of Hollerith punch card and alphabetical accounting equipment and IBM's majority-owned German subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH ( Dehomag ), supplied this equipment from

6867-461: The company designed a video surveillance system for Davao City . In 2014 IBM announced it would sell its x86 server division to Lenovo for $ 2.1 billion. while continuing to offer Power ISA -based servers. Also that year, IBM began announcing several major partnerships with other companies, including Apple Inc. , Twitter, Facebook, Tencent , Cisco , UnderArmour , Box , Microsoft , VMware , CSC , Macy's , Sesame Workshop ,

6976-421: The company more manageable and to streamline IBM by having other investors finance those companies. These included AdStar , dedicated to disk drives and other data storage products; IBM Application Business Systems, dedicated to mid-range computers; IBM Enterprise Systems, dedicated to mainframes; Pennant Systems, dedicated to mid-range and large printers; Lexmark , dedicated to small printers; and more. Lexmark

7085-520: The computer, and it became the basis for the IBM 7950 Harvest , a supercomputer built for cryptanalysis . The third pioneering supercomputer project in the early 1960s was the Atlas at the University of Manchester , built by a team led by Tom Kilburn . He designed the Atlas to have memory space for up to a million words of 48 bits, but because magnetic storage with such a capacity was unaffordable,

7194-475: The early 1930s. This equipment was critical to Nazi efforts to categorize citizens of both Germany and other nations that fell under Nazi control through ongoing censuses. These census data were used to facilitate the round-up of Jews and other targeted groups, and to catalog their movements through the machinery of the Holocaust , including internment in the concentration camps. Nazi concentration camps operated

7303-553: The end of 2017, as CEO of Kyndryl. In 2021, IBM announced the acquisition of the enterprise software company Turbonomic for $ 1.5 billion. In January 2022, IBM announced it would sell Watson Health to private equity firm Francisco Partners . On March 7, 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine , IBM CEO Arvind Krishna published a Ukrainian flag and announced that "we have suspended all business in Russia". All Russian articles were also removed from

7412-445: The enterprise-oriented Personal Systems Group of the IBM PC Co. into IBM's own Global Services personal computer consulting and customer service division. The resulting merged business units then became known simply as IBM Personal Systems Group. A year later, IBM stopped selling their computers at retail outlets after their market share in this sector had fallen considerably behind competitors Compaq and Dell . Immediately afterwards,

7521-408: The fact that the differences in hardware architectures require changes to optimize the operating system to each hardware design. The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM , VTL , and open source software such as Beowulf . In

7630-496: The fastest was made by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. The first such machines were highly tuned conventional designs that ran more quickly than their more general-purpose contemporaries. Through the decade, increasing amounts of parallelism were added, with one to four processors being typical. In the 1970s, vector processors operating on large arrays of data came to dominate. A notable example

7739-413: The field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in the field. As of November 2024 , Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan is the world's fastest supercomputer. The US has five of the top 10; Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Italy and Spain have one each. In June 2018, all combined supercomputers on the TOP500 list broke the 1 exaFLOPS mark. In 1960, UNIVAC built

7848-569: The first Linux supercomputer using commodity parts. While at the University of New Mexico, Bader sought to build a supercomputer running Linux using consumer off-the-shelf parts and a high-speed low-latency interconnection network. The prototype utilized an Alta Technologies "AltaCluster" of eight dual, 333 MHz, Intel Pentium II computers running a modified Linux kernel. Bader ported a significant amount of software to provide Linux support for necessary components as well as code from members of

7957-492: The first time to upgrade to models with greater computing capability without having to rewrite their applications. It was followed by the IBM System/370 in 1970. Together the 360 and 370 made the IBM mainframe the dominant mainframe computer and the dominant computing platform in the industry throughout this period and into the early 1980s. They and the operating systems that ran on them such as OS/VS1 and MVS , and

8066-686: The larger ones. In New York City, IBM has several offices besides CHQ, including the IBM Watson headquarters at Astor Place in Manhattan. Outside of New York, major campuses in the United States include Austin, Texas ; Research Triangle Park (Raleigh-Durham), North Carolina ; Rochester, Minnesota ; and Silicon Valley, California . IBM's real estate holdings are varied and globally diverse. Towers occupied by IBM include 1250 René-Lévesque (Montreal, Canada) and One Atlantic Center (Atlanta, Georgia, US). In Beijing, China, IBM occupies Pangu Plaza ,

8175-570: The late 19th century. Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885; Alexander Dey invented the dial recorder (1888); Herman Hollerith patented the Electric Tabulating Machine (1889); and Willard Bundy invented a time clock to record workers' arrival and departure times on a paper tape (1889). On June 16, 1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming

8284-451: The latest being the IBM z series. The most recent model, the IBM z16 , was released in 2022. In 1990, IBM released the Power microprocessors , which were designed into many console gaming systems, including Xbox 360 , PlayStation 3 , and Nintendo 's Wii U . IBM Secure Blue is encryption hardware that can be built into microprocessors, and in 2014, the company revealed TrueNorth ,

8393-425: The longer term. The key trends of IBM are (as at the financial year ending December 31): The company's 15-member board of directors are responsible for overall corporate management and includes the current or former CEOs of Anthem , Dow Chemical , Johnson and Johnson , Royal Dutch Shell , UPS , and Vanguard as well as the president of Cornell University and a retired U.S. Navy admiral . Vanguard Group

8502-585: The mid-1950s. There are two other IBM buildings within walking distance of CHQ: the North Castle office, which previously served as IBM's headquarters; and the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Center for Learning (formerly known as IBM Learning Center (ILC)), a resort hotel and training center, which has 182 guest rooms, 31 meeting rooms, and various amenities. IBM operates in 174 countries as of 2016 , with mobility centers in smaller market areas and major campuses in

8611-613: The middleware built on top of those such as the CICS transaction processing monitor, had a near-monopoly-level market share and became the thing IBM was most known for during this period. In 1969, the United States of America alleged that IBM violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general-purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business, and subsequently alleged that IBM violated

8720-560: The most common scenario, environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are used. Significant effort is required to optimize an algorithm for the interconnect characteristics of the machine it will be run on; the aim is to prevent any of the CPUs from wasting time waiting on data from other nodes. GPGPUs have hundreds of processor cores and are programmed using programming models such as CUDA or OpenCL . Moreover, it

8829-472: The most successful supercomputers in history. The Cray-2 was released in 1985. It had eight central processing units (CPUs), liquid cooling and the electronics coolant liquid Fluorinert was pumped through the supercomputer architecture . It reached 1.9  gigaFLOPS , making it the first supercomputer to break the gigaflop barrier. The only computer to seriously challenge the Cray-1's performance in

8938-612: The other hand, moving HPC applications have a set of challenges too. Good examples of such challenges are virtualization overhead in the cloud, multi-tenancy of resources, and network latency issues. Much research is currently being done to overcome these challenges and make HPC in the cloud a more realistic possibility. In 2016, Penguin Computing, Parallel Works, R-HPC, Amazon Web Services , Univa , Silicon Graphics International , Rescale , Sabalcore, and Gomput started to offer HPC cloud computing . The Penguin On Demand (POD) cloud

9047-508: The other students in the class, consulting with the teacher only if he or she got stuck. The student would then follow up with multiple-choice questions. As the child moved ahead, the cards would advance in difficulty. IBM purchased SRA in 1964. By this time, the company's line of primary- and secondary-school products had increased. Among the new products was the National Educational Development Tests ,

9156-457: The overall applicability of GPGPUs in general-purpose high-performance computing applications has been the subject of debate, in that while a GPGPU may be tuned to score well on specific benchmarks, its overall applicability to everyday algorithms may be limited unless significant effort is spent to tune the application to it. However, GPUs are gaining ground, and in 2012 the Jaguar supercomputer

9265-511: The overall performance of a computer system, yet the goal of the Linpack benchmark is to approximate how fast the computer solves numerical problems and it is widely used in the industry. The FLOPS measurement is either quoted based on the theoretical floating point performance of a processor (derived from manufacturer's processor specifications and shown as "Rpeak" in the TOP500 lists), which is generally unachievable when running real workloads, or

9374-400: The parent company of Sesame Street , and Salesforce.com . In 2015, its chip division transitioned to a fabless model with semiconductors design, offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries . In 2015, IBM announced three major acquisitions: Merge Healthcare for $ 1 billion, data storage vendor Cleversafe , and all digital assets from The Weather Company , including Weather.com and

9483-401: The present day. The company later also found success in the portable space with the ThinkPad . Since the 1990s, IBM has concentrated on computer services , software , supercomputers , and scientific research ; it sold its microcomputer division to Lenovo in 2005. IBM continues to develop mainframes, and its supercomputers have consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world in

9592-411: The record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021. IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems . During

9701-464: The results. The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray-1's peak of 250 MFLOPS. However, development problems led to only 64 processors being built, and the system could never operate more quickly than about 200 MFLOPS while being much larger and more complex than the Cray. Another problem was that writing software for

9810-605: The shorthand TFLOPS (10 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops ), or peta- , combined into the shorthand PFLOPS (10 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops .) Petascale supercomputers can process one quadrillion (10 ) (1000 trillion) FLOPS. Exascale is computing performance in the exaFLOPS (EFLOPS) range. An EFLOPS is one quintillion (10 ) FLOPS (one million TFLOPS). However, The performance of a supercomputer can be severely impacted by fluctuation brought on by elements like system load, network traffic, and concurrent processes, as mentioned by Brehm and Bruhwiler (2015). No single number can reflect

9919-420: The structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules , polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics , the detonation of nuclear weapons , and nuclear fusion ). They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis . Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades

10028-515: The system was difficult, and getting peak performance from it was a matter of serious effort. But the partial success of the ILLIAC IV was widely seen as pointing the way to the future of supercomputing. Cray argued against this, famously quipping that "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" But by the early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably

10137-444: The time of its deployment, it was considered one of the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world. Though Linux-based clusters using consumer-grade parts, such as Beowulf , existed prior to the development of Bader's prototype and RoadRunner, they lacked the scalability, bandwidth, and parallel computing capabilities to be considered "true" supercomputers. Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths. In

10246-543: The time the biggest in American corporate history. Lou Gerstner was hired as CEO from RJR Nabisco to turn the company around. In 1995, IBM purchased Lotus Software , best known for its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software. During the decade, IBM was working on a new operating system, named the Workplace OS project. Despite a large amount of money spent on the project, it was cancelled in 1996. In 1998, IBM merged

10355-406: The top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7  gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network. The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon

10464-422: The trend has been to move away from in-house operating systems to the adaptation of generic software such as Linux . Since modern massively parallel supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes , they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g. using a small and efficient lightweight kernel such as CNK or CNL on compute nodes, but

10573-608: The vacuum tube based IBM 701 , in 1952. The IBM 305 RAMAC introduced the hard disk drive in 1956. The company switched to transistorized designs with the 7000 and 1400 series, beginning in 1958. In which, IBM considered the 1400 series the ''model T'' of computing, due to it being the first computer with over ten thousand sales by IBM. In 1956, the company demonstrated the first practical example of artificial intelligence when Arthur L. Samuel of IBM's Poughkeepsie , New York, laboratory programmed an IBM 704 not merely to play checkers but "learn" from its own experience. In 1957,

10682-511: Was liquid cooled , and used a Fluorinert "cooling waterfall" which was forced through the modules under pressure. However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company . In

10791-624: Was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two-dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes, communicating via the Message Passing Interface . Software development remained a problem, but the CM series sparked off considerable research into this issue. Similar designs using custom hardware were made by many companies, including the Evans & Sutherland ES-1 , MasPar , nCUBE , Intel iPSC and

10900-488: Was acquired by Clayton & Dubilier in a leveraged buyout shortly after its formation. In September 1992, IBM completed the spin-off of their various non-mainframe and non-midrange, personal computer manufacturing divisions, combining them into an autonomous wholly owned subsidiary known as the IBM Personal Computer Company (IBM PC Co.). This corporate restructuring came after IBM reported

11009-552: Was announced that IBM will build Europe's first quantum computer in Ehningen, Germany . The center, to be operated by the Fraunhofer Society , was still in construction as of 2023, with cloud access planned in 2024. Supercomputer This is an accepted version of this page A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of

11118-400: Was completely out of IBM. IBM is headquartered in Armonk, New York , a community 37 miles (60 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. A nickname for the company is the " Colossus of Armonk ". Its principal building, referred to as CHQ, is a 283,000-square-foot (26,300 m ) glass and stone edifice on a 25-acre (10 ha) parcel amid a 432-acre former apple orchard the company purchased in

11227-426: Was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. The CDC 6600 , designed by Seymour Cray , was finished in 1964 and marked the transition from germanium to silicon transistors. Silicon transistors could run more quickly and the overheating problem was solved by introducing refrigeration to the supercomputer design. Thus,

11336-400: Was exhibited on Jeopardy! where it won against game-show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The company also celebrated its 100th anniversary in the same year on June 16. In 2012, IBM announced it had agreed to buy Kenexa and Texas Memory Systems, and a year later it also acquired SoftLayer Technologies, a web hosting service , in a deal worth around $ 2 billion. Also that year,

11445-640: Was originally part of the joint venture and was sold by LG in 2012. Continuing a trend started in the 1990s of downsizing its operations and divesting from commodity production , IBM sold all of its personal computer business to Chinese technology company Lenovo and, in 2009, it acquired software company SPSS Inc. Later in 2009, IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing program was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by U.S. President Barack Obama . In 2011, IBM gained worldwide attention for its artificial intelligence program Watson , which

11554-477: Was purchased by McGraw-Hill Education. The brand name and products were made part of the PreK-12 business of the company. The Imagine It! reading program was launched in 2007. McGraw-Hill Education also competes as a publisher of mathematics and science materials with programs such as Real Math, Number Worlds and Snapshots Video Science . IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using

11663-507: Was recognized with the 1990 Honor Award from the National Building Museum . IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. As of 2016 , these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing , artificial intelligence, commerce , data and analytics , Internet of things (IoT), IT infrastructure , mobile , digital workplace and cybersecurity . Since 1954, IBM sells mainframe computers ,

11772-771: Was transformed into Titan by retrofitting CPUs with GPUs. High-performance computers have an expected life cycle of about three years before requiring an upgrade. The Gyoukou supercomputer is unique in that it uses both a massively parallel design and liquid immersion cooling . A number of special-purpose systems have been designed, dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom ASICs , allowing better price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. Examples of special-purpose supercomputers include Belle , Deep Blue , and Hydra for playing chess , Gravity Pipe for astrophysics, MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure prediction and molecular dynamics, and Deep Crack for breaking

11881-480: Was valued at over $ 153 billion as of May 2024. Despite its relative decline within the technology sector, IBM remains the seventh largest technology company by revenue, and 67th largest overall company by revenue in the United States . IBM ranked No. 38 on the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. In 2014, IBM was accused of using "financial engineering" to hit its quarterly earnings targets rather than investing for

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