Historical Impact of Government Investment in High Performance Computing
Dr. Robert Leland is the Chief Technology Officer of Sandia National Laboratories. He presented the opening talk of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC 2016, http://icrc.ieee.org/), held in San Diego, CA, Oct. 17-19, 2016. Dr. Leland reviewed the history of supercomputing, starting with the mainframe era in the 1950s. This was followed by the vector (parallel) era in the 1970s, the distributed memory (massively parallel) era in the 1990s, and the latest transition to a many-core era with heterogeneous nodes. In each case, US government investment was needed to make the transition from one era to the next. The National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) is the latest effort to promote the development of a new generation of supercomputing hardware and software.
Other presentations from ICRC 2016 are available here.