History of Computing at IBM by Brian Ho CS147 – Dr. Sin-Min Lee Fall 2009

Brief Overview of IBM  IBM stands for International Business Machines Corporation.  Founded in 1896 in Endicott, NY

Herman Hollerith  His punch card tabulating technology was used for the 1890 census, saving the U.S. government $5 mil.  Punch cards become the industry standard of input for the next 70 years.  His company was later merged into what is now IBM.

Thomas J. Watson, Sr.  Became president of IBM (then C-T-R) in  Built IBM into a global corporation by investing in his employees and research.  Hired disabled WWI vets to work for IBM.

1944 ASCC  The world’s first large- scale calculating computer.  Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, a.k.a. Mark I.  Used electromagnetic relays to solve addition problems in < 1 second, multiplication in 6 seconds, and division in 12 seconds.

1946 – The IBM 603  The IBM 603 Electronic Multiplier, the first commercial product to incorporate electronic arithmetic circuits.  Used vacuum tubes.  Part of a program to make “super calculators”  Would perform faster than the ASCC.

1946 – Chinese Character Typewriter  WHOA!  Chinese ideographic character typewriter.  Experienced users could type at a rate of 40 to 45 Chinese words per minute.

WHOA!  Had over 1,000 characters engraved in a cylinder Must have been hard to use!

1948 – IBM SSEC  IBM’s first large-scale digital calculating machine.  It was the first computer that could modify a stored program.  Contained 12,000 vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.

1948 – IBM 604  First assemblage of digital electronics replaceable as a unit.  Service engineers could pull out a defective unit and plug in a replacement, saving time.

Thomas Watson, Jr.  Became president of IBM in 1952  Moved IBM away from punch cards and into electronic computers.

1952 – IBM 701 and First CA Research Lab  IBM’s first production computer.  Designed primarily for scientific calculations.  Featured a tape drive vacuum column, which paved the way for magnetic tape to become a popular storage medium.  First West Coast lab is opened in San Jose, CA.

Magnetic Storage Devices

1953 – IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Calculator  The most popular computer of the 1950s.  Purchased by universities and businesses for scientific computation and accounting capabilities.

1954 – NORC  The fastest, most powerful electronic computer of its time.  Naval Ordnance Research Computer  Built for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance

1959 – IBM 1401  The first high-volume, stored program, core- memory, transistorized computer.  Included the IBM 1403 printer.

1961 – 7030 STRETCH  IBM’s first attempt in the supercomputer industry.  Amdahl said it would not meet the performance requirement the government asked for.  When it did not meet the requirements in Los Alamos Nation Laboratories in New Mexico,  Watson rebated the profit and development cost to the government until it could meet the performance requirements.

IBM 7030 STRETCH (continued)  Pioneered advanced systems concepts: Lookahead Pipelining Use of transistors Use of bytes

SABRE  Semi-Automatic Business- Related Environment  Two IBM 7090 mainframes formed the backbone of the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines.  Linked high-speed computers and data communications in more than 50 cities.

1964 – IBM SYSTEM/360  Incorporated the IBM Solid Logic Technology (SLT) microelectronics  Uses the same programming instructions.  Created a family of compatible computers.

1980 – RISC in IBM  IBM Fellow John Cocke came up with RISC architecture  Reduced Instruction Set Computer  IBM’s first prototype employing RISC, the IBM 801

1985 – Token Ring Network  Allowed printers and computers to be connected on a network.  Became the industry standard

1990 – RISC System/6000  A family of 9 workstations that are some of the fastest in the industry.  Were able to improve because of RISC architecture

1997 – Deep Blue  Beat the reigning world grandmaster of chess Garry Kasparov in  First time a computer ever beat a world champion in a six game match.

Blue Gene IBM’s Super Computer Project

Blue Gene  Its name is an allusion to IBM’s nickname “Big Blue” and the corporation’s official color: blue.  a computer architecture project designed to produce supercomputers with operating speeds in the petaFLOPS range.

Blue Gene/L  Developed in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)  Started in 1999  Was to be applied to protein folding

Blue Gene/L (continued)  Is a massively parallel computer.  Utilizes 8 cabinets, each holding 1,024 computer nodes  Was upgraded to 16 cabinets in 2004, achieving TFLOPS  Upgraded again multiple times, resulting in 64 total cabinets in 2005

Blue Gene/P  Unveiled in 2007  Designed to run continuously at 1 PFLOPS.  Features a 72-rack system that can be scaled to an 884,736- processor, 216-rack cluster  In its 216-rack configuration, it can achieve 3-PFLOPS performance  To be succeeded by Blue Gene/Q, due to reach 20 PFLOPS in 2011.

IBM Roadrunner  Fastest supercomputer in the world.  Achieved PFLOPS on May 25,  Built for U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)

IBM Roadrunner (continued)  Uses a series of TriBlades  A TriBlade consists of: 2 dual-core Opterons with 16 GB RAM 4 PowerXCell 8i CPUs with 16 GB Cell RAM A bunch of other stuff