CDC 6600

The CDC 6600 was a mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first (first in the United States) delivered in 1964 to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, part of the University of California at Berkeley. It was used primarily for high energy nuclear physics research, particularly for the analysis of nuclear events photographed inside the Alvarez bubble chamber. The very first CDC 6600 was delivered about one year earlier to Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland also for use in high energy nuclear physics research. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, IBM 7030 Stretch, by about three times. With performance of about 1 megaFLOPS, it remained the world's fastest computer from 1964–69, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.