Jon, Your project is highly interesting. To my knowledge, there is not much published on continental Europe – while a few articles appeared long ago about the Ferranti Atlas computer in Britain. Regarding Germany, you may look at the papers published in the IEEE Annals on Telefunken machines. The conference proceedings at the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (Hashagen, Ulf & Raùl Rojas (2000): The First Computers. History and Architectures, Cambridge, MA), mentioned by Mariann Unterluggauer, contain a paper on the Ferranti Atlas, but nothing on German developments post-1962. Regarding France, no specific history has ever been written. All I can do is to translate a slice from my present manuscript on the History of the Plan Calcul : After the commercial failure of the Bull Gamma 60 in the early 1960s (17 units manufactured), French efforts regarding supercomputer developments seemed to reach a glass ceiling. The small SEA company delivered two units of its Dorothee dataflow machine to military labs, but received no further funding to expand on this basis. In the context of the Plan Calcul, from 1965 to the early 1970s, supercomputer development was the matter of many talks, while IBM, Univac and Control Data reigned on HPC facilities. The driving idea of these talks was to develop a European supercomputer line, in a joint effort combining specialists of Bull, then CII with British and German manufacturers. The combination of partners varied over the years, but the process was always the same : Experts representing these companies met, often in Brussels, presented technical reports, considered marketing data, and regularly came to the conclusion that they would only move forward if governments funded the whole R&D and manufacturing expenses. In other words, the massive presence of IBM and Control Data determined the high level of the ticket to pay for entering this niche market. And governments in the 1970s preferred to direct their funds to the development of computer networks. The national champion of the French Plan Calcul, CII (1966-1975), focused on making mid-range commercial machines, and carefully avoided dispersing its forces in supercomputer projects – despite the political rethoric which came with it as dressing. The nearest CII approached high-end calculators was its large Iris80, of which a 4- processor version was tested by 1973, and abandoned for technical reasons regarding connection complexity. A seemingly wise decision, as only 34 Iris80 biprocessors were sold, in competition against GE 600s and IBM large /370s. The same goes with Unidata (CII-Siemens- Philips), of which even the high-end machines developed by CII cannot be considered supercomputers. Supercomputer developments were resumed in the 1980s, in the context of both the intensification of the cold war (Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Euromissile tension and American SDI) and the policy of the French socialist administration to foster the electronics industry. Various projects experimenting with parallel architectures (ISIS, Marisis, Acri, etc.) mobilized teams within Groupe Bull, INRIA and CNET (respectively the research institutes for computing and telecommunications) and in different companies. One of the major problems was the cost of making specific components. After the Soviet threat disappeared in the early 1990s, military fundings were cut and these projects killed. Breaking the glass ceiling became possible when Bull an old company seemingly in its terminal stage by 2000, dropped its traditional strategy as a universal computer manufacturer following IBM, and concentrated on designing highly parallel computer systems in partnership with the Commissariat a lEnergie Atomique (CEA), buying components off-the shelf. Youll find the rest of the story on press releases, such as : http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/rend.jsp?DocId=660679&lang=en http://www.wcm.bull.com/internet/pr/rend.jsp?DocId=713261&lang=en Best wishes. Pierre Pierre Mounier-Kuhn CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne http://pups.paris-sorbonne.fr/pages/aff_livre.php?Id=838 Le 19 janv. 13 à 00:01, Jon Lindsay a écrit :
Dear Colleagues,
I'm part of a project at UCSD, now in its very early stages and funded through Lawrence Livermore NL, to assess Chinese progress and prospects in High Performance Computing. As you probably know, China has recently exploded onto the HPC scene with 13% of the Top500 systems and growing, including a brief showing at the top with the Tianhe-1A. An article in the most recent Science even suggests that China may be the first to hit the exascale mark. (Incidentally, if this happens and if it happens on Moore's timeline, it will raise some very interesting questions about just how the heck Moore's Law is working across international boundaries and quite different cultural approaches to S&T).
We are very much interested in the institutional context & drivers of Chinese HPC growth, and in comparing this with the history of supercomputing elsewhere (US, Europe, Japan). I would be very interested in any work you might recommend on this history. On the US experience I am aware of MacKenzie's excellent 1991 and 1994 articles, books on Pentagon support by Norberg & ONeill 1996 and Akera 2008, NRC volumes on HPC from 1999 and 2004, and Edwards 2010 is certainly relevant too. I also see that there's a volume on the history of the Top500 by Meuer et al coming out later this summer which appears to emphasize mainly technical milestones. What other key texts on the evolution of supercomputing am I missing, especially beyond the American case?
Thanks very much for any and all suggestions!
Best, Jon _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members