Roger B. Lazarus: Computing at LASL in the 1940s and 1950s (1978)

The Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have been important sponsors of, and customers for, supercomputers-high-performance scientific computers. The laboratories played an important part in establishing speed of floating-point arithmetic (rather than, say, at logical operations) as the performance criterion defining supercomputing. But their more specific influence on the evolution of computer architecture has been limited by the diversity and classified nature of their central computational tasks, together with the expansion of supercomputer use elsewhere.

The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection:

In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science and technology as well as other historical and policy-related publications that had formerly been available on the Lab’s web site as part of its Library Without Walls initiative.

Fortunately, almost all of the withdrawn reports were acquired and preserved in the public domain by researchers Gregory Walker and Carey Sublette. The document titles are indexed in four parts

Publisher: Washington: Dept. of Energy ; Springfield, Va. : For sale by the National Technical Information Service, 1978.

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