In 1995 MIT borrowed Sandia's Paragon supercomputer to win the World Computer Chess Championship
lauriewired · x · 2026-10-08
lauriewired retold a CS history anecdote: in 1995, MIT convinced Sandia National Labs to lend Paragon—the world's 2nd fastest supercomputer—to run their chess engine for the 8th World Computer Chess Championship. Chess is hard due to irregular parallelism, and Paragon's Red/Black switching architecture let Sandia pause classified nuclear yield workloads periodically for the game. He recommends Christopher Joerg's PhD thesis on the Cilk system as the best source.
Related event: How MIT's 1995 Supercomputer Chess Loss Gave Birth to Work Stealing(2 posts)→
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