History

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Through it's relatively short history, SC has highlighted some of the most important innovations of the information age, including the birth and growth of the World Wide Web, the development of massively parallel, distributed shared memory, and cluster supercomputers, and the growth of distributed computing and collaboration using grids. The first SC conference (then called Supercomputing) convened in Orlando, FLA, in 1988, when peak performance was an "impressive" 3 gigaflops. Fourteen year later as the conference prepares to meet in Baltimore, teraflops-level machines are becoming the norm, Linux commodity clusters are redefining high performance computing, innovators are unearthing insights from terabytes of data, and sophisticated scientific tools, applications, and display systems are available worldwide through grid technologies. It's been a long, interesting, and sometimes unpredictable journey for SC and for the community it serves. This section includes information on past conferences and on the SC conference series in general.