The Control Data Corporation’s Supercomputer Systems

This book is the ninth volume in the Historical Computing Machines series, which aims to document the history of computing machines from the late 1930s up to about 1995. It is the second volume on Control Data computers. It is focused on the Control Data Corporation’s supercomputer systems which brought to maturity the design principles espoused by Seymour Cray. Later systems, after Cray left CDC, continued the development of families of supercomputers through the mid-1990s. CDC developed and sold supercomputers – some of the fastest machines for over 25 years – for scientific and engineering organizations. CDC’s supercomputer systems continued to be minimalist in their instruction sets, almost RISC-like in some senses. This volume covers CDC supercomputer systems through the demise of CDC as the Cold War ended, describes their system software, their effect on programming language designs, and key applications. As such, this volume strives to bring together a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, view of the capabilities of CDC supercomputer systems.