How PDC began

In 1988, a group of researchers at the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm applied for a grant to buy a massively parallel computer: a CM-2 Connection Machine from Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC). A driving force behind the application was the belief that massively parallel computers would become an important technology, both in computer science and high-performance computing. Equally importantly, there was a need for the performance that could be delivered by this type of computer architecture, particularly in terms of extending the scope of modelling that would be possible. The grant was awarded, and a price and configuration for the system was negotiated. During the autumn of 1989, TMC installed an 8K Connection Machine CM-2 at KTH.

At this time, the idea came up to group together resources and activities around the CM-2 and already existing parallel computers at KTH. As a result, a centre was established at KTH. In Swedish it was called the “Parallelldatorcentrum” (PDC), which means “Center for Parallel Computers”. PDC was inaugurated by Janne Carlsson, the President of KTH at the time, on 15 January 1990. In January 1991, PDC applied for an upgrade of the CM-2 to a CM-200. The application was successful and the upgrade was installed in December 1991.

An important milestone for PDC was the installation of the IBM SP2 cluster (named Strindberg) in 1994. The Strindberg SP2 supercomputer consisted of multiple nodes interconnected by a switch. (A switch in this context is a device that makes it possible to transfer information efficiently between many nodes.) The Strindberg system was significant because it demonstrated that supercomputers could be built by connecting many powerful workstations (nodes). This approach is still the dominant method for designing HPC systems due to cost benefits resulting from the (relatively cheap) mass production of the individual nodes.

Since then, the supercomputer systems at PDC have continued to be upgraded to provide top-notch HPC systems for research, thanks to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Swedish organisations that provide funding for the Swedish HPC research infrastructure, such as the current National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) and previously the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC).

Details about many of these earlier systems at PDC can be found in the list of PDC’s entries in the TOP500 list . (This list is published twice a year and lists the 500 most powerful public computer systems in the world.) Information about very recent systems at PDC can be found here , and, if you are curious about the names of PDC systems, you can read about the artists who inspired the names .

If you are interested in how research on the HPC systems at PDC has developed since PDC was established, you can read the early PDC reports  and the subsequent PDC newsletters  online.