Research

It was not always clear that computer software was patentable in the United States. While it is clearly patentable at the present time, it is not clear that this will always be the case. The following description provides a brief history of software patents in the United States.

Numerical Wind Tunnel was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performance of close to 100 Gflop/s for a wide range of fluid dynamics application programs. It stood out at the top of the TOP500 during 1993-1996.

On August 15, 2001, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) hosted a dedication ceremony for IBM’s ASCI White, the world’s fastest supercomputer—capable of more than 12 trillion mathematical operations per second.

The HITACHI SR2201 was a distributed memory parallel system that was introduced in March 1996 by Hitachi. Its processor, the 150 MHz HARP-1E based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture, solved the cache miss penalty by pseudo vector processing (PVP). In PVP, data was loaded by prefetching to a special register bank, bypassing the cache. Each processor had a peak performance of 300 MFLOPS, giving the SR2201 a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS. Up to 2048 RISC processors could be connected via a high-speed three dimensional crossbar network, which was able to transfer data at 300 MB/s over each link.

ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ASCI Red became operational in 1997 and was retired from service in September, 2005. It was the fastest computer on the TOP500 list from June 1997 to June 2000. It was decommissioned in 2006.

The Earth Simulator (ES), developed by the Japanese government's initiative "Earth Simulator Project", was a highly parallel vector supercomputer system for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics. The system was developed for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Japan Marine Science and Technology Center in 1997. Construction started in October 1999, and the site officially opened on March 11, 2002. The project cost 60 billion yen.

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS). It is a cooperative project among IBM (particularly IBM Rochester and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), and academia. There are four Blue Gene projects in development: Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/C, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q.

Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's tenth fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008 to become the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It is a one-of-a-kind supercomputer, built from off the shelf parts, with many novel design features.

Jaguar is a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar has a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraflops (1.75 petaflops). It has 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operates with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar is a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.

Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1, in English, "Milky Way (literally, Sky River) Number One", is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.566 petaFLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and is one of the few Petascale supercomputers in the world.