History of PDC
Origins of PDC
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 would 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 the Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) offered the best choice with its Connection Machine system, CM-2. Money was granted and during the fall 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 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 CM-2 to a CM-200. The application was successful and the upgrade was installed in December 1991.
Computers through PDC's history
Over the years PDC has had several high-ranking systems in the TOP500 list, which lists the 500 most powerful computer systems that are publically known about in the world. The table below highlights some of PDC's major systems and their ranking. For a detailed list, visit PDC's TOP500 entry .
| Year | Rank | Processors | Peak GFLOPS | System | Vendor | Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 69 | 67456 | 2438000 | XC40 | Cray | Beskow |
| 2014 | 32 | 53632 | 1973658 | XC40 | Cray | Beskow |
| 2011 | 31 | 36384 | 305626.00 | XE6 12-core 2.1 GHz | Cray | Lindgren |
| 2010 | 76 | 11016 | 92534.40 | XT6m 12-core 2.1 GHz | Cray | Lindgren |
| 2010 | 89 | 9800 | 86024.40 | PowerEdge SC1435 Dual core Opteron 2.2GHz, Infiniband | Dell | Ekman |
| 2005 | 65 | 886 | 5670.40 | PowerEdge 1850 3.2 GHz, Infiniband | Dell | Lenngren |
| 2003 | 196 | 180 | 648.00 | Cluster Platform 6000 rx2600 Itanium2 900 MHz Cluster, Myrinet | HP | Lucidor |
| 1998 | 60 | 146 | 93.44 | SP P2SC 160 MHz | IBM | Strindberg |
| 1996 | 64 | 96 | 17.17 | SP2/96 | IBM | Strindberg |
| 1994 | 341 | 256 | 2.50 | CM-200/8k | Thinking Machines | Bellman |
PDC Reports
PDC Progress Reports (1990-2003)
The PDC Progress Reports chronicled developments at PDC from 1990-2003. PDF versions of the reports are available below for historical interest. Please note that some of the reports may be missing figures which were not available in electronic form.
- PDC Progress Report 2000-2003 ISBN 91-631-6106-0 Part 1 (pdf 7.8 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 2000-2003 Part 2 (pdf 8.7 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1998-1999 ISBN 91-7170-487-6 (pdf 5.4 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1997 ISBN 91-7170-246-6 (pdf 6.5 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1994-1996 ISBN 91-7170-695-X (pdf 9.1 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1993 ISBN 91-7170-805-7 (pdf 4.4 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1992 ISBN 91-7170-127-3 (pdf 1.7 MB)
- PDC Progress Report 1990-1991 ISBN 91-7170-102-8 (pdf 1.8 MB)
PDC TRITA Reports
From 1993 to 2005 PDC issued the following reports in the Transactions of the Royal Institute of Technology (TRITA) series. (Some of these reports can be found in the archive at Los Alamos - search on title or author.)
List of PDC Reports in the Transactions of the Royal Institute of Technology (TRITA) series