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The first supercomputer was designed and developed by Seymour Cray, an electrical engineer who was deemed the father of supercomputing. He initially worked for a company called Control Data Corporation where he worked on the CDC 6600 which was the first and fastest supercomputer between 1964 and 1969.

He left in 1972 to form Cray Research and in 1975, announced his own supercomputer, the Cray-1. It was the most powerful and most successful supercomputer in history and was used until the late 1980s.

Fast forward to the 2000s, which saw a huge boom in the number of processors working in parallel, with numbers upward in the tens of thousands. Such examples in the evolution in parallel computing, High Performance Computing, and multi-core systems include the fastest supercomputer today, which is Japan's Fugaku. It boasts an impressive 7.3 million cores, all of which are, for the first time in a supercomputer, ARM-based. It uses a hybrid-memory model and a new network architecture that provides higher cohesion among all the nodes. The success of the new system is a radical paradigm-shift from the departure of traditional supercomputing towards that of ARM-powered systems. It is also proof the designers wanted to highlight that HPC still has much room for improvement and innovation.