Ferranti Atlas: Britain's first supercomputer

“An Atlas at Manchester…”

…When first switched on in December 1962, Atlas was the world’s most powerful computer. Some of the software concepts it pioneered, like ‘virtual memory’, are among the most important breakthroughs in computer design and still used today. In this video you can see archive footage of the Atlas running as well as interviews with some of the engineers and researchers who used it.

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The Atlas popped up unexpectedly in a Pi day computing challenge…

Over here there’s a brief mention of the short paper The Riemann Hypothesis and Pseudorandom Features of the Möbius Sequence by Good and Churchhouse - one can read it here. It’s an example of a large scale pure mathematics computation, in 1967 - 50 batch jobs, or maybe 100, of which two failed, running on the Atlas at Chilton. We’re not told the runtime.

More about the Atlas on the ever-interesting Chilton computing history pages:

National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science (NIRNS) Atlas 1

  • This was the largest Atlas installation with 48k words of main memory and 32 magnetic tape decks. Installation and commissioning started in June 1964 and one-shift working began on 8th October 1964. The operation was later organised as a separate establishment - the Science Research Council Atlas Computing Laboratory - and provided a general computing service to all UK universities. The system was shut down (and replaced by an ICT1906A) in March 1973.

A nice overview of the machine and its uses in

Some other topics here regarding or mentioning the Atlas: