N.S.A Super Computer - Was the Worlds fastest watercooled computer (90's)

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to perform higher-level mathematical calculations. The CM-5 was built by the Thinking Machines Corporation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a cost of US $25 million. The system was installed at NSA in 1991, and operated until 1997. It was the first massively parallel processing computer bought by NSA, originally containing 256 processing nodes. The system was upgraded in 1993 with an additional 256 nodes, for a total of 512 nodes. The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words (~2 terabytes) of storage, 2.5 billion words (~10 gigabytes) of memory, and could perform at a theoretical maximum 65.5 gigaflops. The operating system CMOst was based on UNIX, but optimized for parallel processing.


FROSTBURG is now on display at the National Cryptologic Museum.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• super
• computer
• watercooled
• nsa
• worlds
• fastest
• the
• thinking
• machine
• cray
• cm-5
• nwo
• lol
• spys
• frostburg
• connection
• mathematical
• unix
• processor
• gigaflops

[mickycheese27]

By 2100 my grand children would be reading how 'Slow' old computers were for their history lesson in their exaflop virtual class room

[rclifford13]

Treyarch should have told us this was what we needed to run Black Ops...

[TheSuperMegaSniper]

I wonder if it can run Pong.

[infoburp]

I think it's pretty awesome that I have more storage, RAM and cpu power on my desktop pc :D I wonder what people will do with petascale pcs?

[allyshank]

A sniper lobby of snd on dome on one of these as host. You'd get every kill

[kyro2000]

@rclifford13 lol black ops is not that graphics demanding crysis how ever is.

[ITGxGaming]

but can it run minecraft

[thereddog223]

Pretty much

[PhysicsTowerTeam]

@graeme520 Not very well. They are designed for calculations, not games ;).

You wouldn't have a mathematician in the Olympics, for comparison.

[mulgure1]

minecraft still lags on those :P

[graeme520]

i wonder how it would be to play minecraft on those :O

[micktrainor92]

... and outdated. :P