Seymour Cray bet on oxen over chickens, and the chickens eventually won
Seymour Cray, who built the world's fastest computers for decades, scoffed at machines made from swarms of small processors. Would you plough with two strong oxen, he asked, or with 1,024 chickens? Yet today's top supercomputers are exactly that flock: tens of thousands of ordinary chips working on pieces of one problem.
Cray's oxen were superb. His CDC 6600 of 1964 switched from germanium to faster silicon transistors, used refrigeration to stop them overheating, and outran every rival by about ten times; it defined the category, selling a hundred units at 8 million dollars each. After founding Cray Research he delivered the Cray-1 in 1976, one of the most successful supercomputers ever, and the liquid-cooled Cray-2 of 1985 became the first to pass a billion floating-point operations per second.
The chickens started badly. ILLIAC IV, designed in 1966 as the first true massively parallel machine, was meant to have 256 processors reaching a billion operations a second. Troubles meant only 64 were built, it never beat about 200 million, and programming it was painful. Still, many saw it as the future. MIT research produced the Connection Machine, whose first version linked as many as 65,536 simple processors, and by the mid-1990s ordinary processors had become fast enough to serve as the building blocks.
Cheap parts sealed the shift. In 1998 David Bader at the University of New Mexico assembled a Linux supercomputer prototype from off-the-shelf Pentium II machines; its successor, RoadRunner, entered service in April 1999 among the world's hundred fastest. Since November 2017 every one of the 500 fastest supercomputers has run Linux, and graphics processors have joined the mix.
Speeds are counted in floating-point operations per second. A desktop manages hundreds of billions to tens of trillions, while exascale machines, running since 2022, exceed a billion billion. As of June 2026 the fastest is LineShine at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, though the United States holds four of the top ten.
Source: Supercomputer
