Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing (Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science)

The rapid and extraordinary progress of supercomputing over the past half- century is a powerful demonstration of our relentless drive to understand and shape the world around us.

In this book, David Barkai offers a unique and compelling account of this remarkable technological journey, drawing from his own rich experiences working at the forefront of high-performance computing (HPC).This book is a journey delineated as five decade-long ‘epochs’ defined by the systems’ architectural themes: vector processors, multi-processors, microprocessors, clusters, and accelerators and cloud computing.

The final part examines key issues of HPC and discusses where it might be headed.A central goal of this book is to show how computing power has been applied, and, more importantly, how it has impacted and benefitted society.