History

A long, long time ago...

in 1988 a group of scientists at the School of Computer Science and

Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH: Kungliga Tekniska
Högskolan) applied for a grant to buy a massively parallel computer. A driving
force behind the application was the belief that massive parallelism will become
an important technology both in computer science and high-performance computing.

Equally important, there was a need for the performance that could be
delivered by such an architecture.
The computer market was surveyed and it was decided that Thinking Machines

Corporation (TMC) offered the best choice with its Connection Machine

system, CM2. Money was granted and during the fall of 1989 TMC installed an

8K Connection Machine CM2 at KTH.
At this time the idea came up to group together resources and activities
around the CM2 and already existing parallel computers. Thus, what was to be
called the Center for Parallel Computers was formed and inaugurated by Janne
Carlsson, the President of KTH, on January 15, 1990.
In January 1991 PDC applied for an upgrade of the CM2 to a CM200. The
application was successful and the upgrade was installed in December 1991.

Computers through PDC's history