The
CDC 6600 was the flagship
mainframe supercomputer of the
6000 series of computer systems manufactured by
Control Data Corporation. The first CDC 6600 was delivered in 1965 to the
CERN laboratory near
Geneva,
Switzerland, where it was used to analyse the two to three million photographs of bubble-chamber tracks that CERN experiments were producing every year. In 1966 another CDC 6600 was delivered to the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, part of the University of California at Berkeley, where it was used for the analysis of nuclear events photographed inside the Alvarez bubble chamber. The CDC 6600 is generally considered to be the first successful
supercomputer, outperforming its fastest predecessor, the
IBM 7030 Stretch, roughly by a factor of three. With performance of up to three
megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the
CDC 7600.