In the 1980s,
vector supercomputing dominated
high-performance computing, as embodied
in the eponymously named
systems designed by the late Seymour
Cray. The 1990s saw the rise of massively
parallel processing (MPPs) and shared
memory multiprocessors (SMPs) built
by Thinking Machines, Silicon Graphics,
and others. In turn, clusters of commodity
(Intel/AMD x86) and purpose-built
processors (such as IBM’s BlueGene),
dominated the previous decade.