Going on Royal Pingdom’s latest gallery, there are two schools of supercomputer design. First, we have the kick-ass, retro-future Death Star category, which includes the The Connection Machine 5 (above), a machine so cool-looking that it actually had a minor role in the movie Jurassic Park. It wasn’t just flashing lights, though. The CM-5 had a massive two (2!) terabytes of RAM, and that was back in 1993.
The second kind of supercomputer design is what we like to call the “filing-cabinet school”, designs so dull that they fit right into even the beige-est of offices. The epitome of this was the cool-sounding Earth Simulator, the world’s fastest computer between 2002 and 2004 with a ridiculous 10 terabytes of RAM. The Earth Simulator could more accurately be called the “Locker-Room Simulator”, so closely does it resemble row upon row of metal closets.
As ever with Pingdom’s galleries, you’ll learn a lot. Did you know, for example, that between 1997 and 2000, the world’s fastest computer used Pentium chips?
Ten of the coolest and most powerful supercomputers of all time [Royal Pingdom. Thanks, Peter!]
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