IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder and first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which as of June 8, 2018 is the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of 200 petaflops. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 122.3 petaflops. As of June 2018, the supercomputer is also the 5th most energy efficient in the world with a measured power efficiency of 13.889 GFlops/watts. Summit is the first supercomputer to reach exascale speed, achieving 1.88 exaops during a genomic analysis and is expected to reach 3.3 exaops using mixed precision calculations.
Deep Blue was a chess-playing computer developed by IBM. It is known for being the first computer chess-playing system to win both a chess game and a chess match against a reigning world champion under regular time controls.
The Blue Brain, a Swiss national brain initiative, aims to create a digital reconstruction of the brain by reverse-engineering mammalian brain circuitry. The mission of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function in health and disease.
PARAM is a series of supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune, India. The latest machine in the series is the PARAM ISHAN.
The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1's were sold, making it one of the most successful supercomputers in history. It is perhaps best known for its unique shape, a relatively small C-shaped cabinet with a ring of benches around the outside covering the power supplies.
Titan or OLCF-3 is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan is an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan is the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.
The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of June 2018, is ranked second in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. This is nearly three times as fast as the Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. As of June 2017, it is ranked as the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the Green500, with an efficiency of 6.051 GFlops/watt. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China.
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 33.86-petaflop supercomputer located in National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
The K computer – named for the Japanese word "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – is a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer is based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It is used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system is based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.
SGI Onyx, code named Eveready and Terminator, is a series of visualization systems designed and manufactured by SGI, introduced in 1993 and offered in two models, deskside and rackmount. The Onyx's basic system architecture is based on the SGI Challenge servers, but with the notable inclusion of graphics hardware.
The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964.
ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.