Super Computers

By Phuong Vo

What is a Supercomputer?
Supercomputer is a broad term for one of the fastest computer currently available.
Super computers were designed and built to work on extremely large jobs that could not be handled by no other types of computing systems.

What is a Supercomputer? (contd)

Supercomputers speed are measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS) in units of megaflops (MFOPS) gigaflops (GFLOPS) teraflops (TFLOPS)

What are Supercomputers Used For?

scientific simulations animated graphics analysis of geological data nuclear energy research and meteorology computational fluid dynamics

Early History Supercomputer.

Seymour Clay made the first transistorized computer (CDC 1604) in 1964.
In 1965 Cray developed CDC 6600, the first multithreading computer. Cray then developed the CDC 7600 in 1970. Cray-1 supercomputers project started in 1972 and finished in 1974 and was twice as fast as the 7600 with a vector speed of 80 MFLOPS.

Early History of Supercomputer. (contd)

In 1990 Cray successful build Cray-4 the fastest supercomputer in the world at around 10 gigaflops and was smaller than a human brain. Cray died on October 5th 1996 at the age of 71 as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident.
Currently the fastest computer is IBM BlueGene/L at around 73 teraflops (TFLOPS)

Parallel Processing
Two common type used in supercomputers.

Cluster Multi-Processor

Cluster Computers
Cluster computers are two or more computers working parallel to achieve greater performances. Cluster computers breakup work among the computers in the cluster.

Cluster Computers (contd)

Each computer in the cluster is a cpu itself with its own processor, memory, and disk.
The computers communicate with each other via an interconnecting bus.

Xbox Cluster
www.anandtech.com successfully built a XBOX Linux cluster consisting of 8 XBOXs.
XBOX specs: PIII 733MHz 128K L2 Seagate 5400RPM 8GB 64MB Shared PC3200

Xbox Cluster (contd)

Performance Benchmarks
Distributed Compiling Distributed Rendering

Multi-Processor
A multi-processor computer has 2 or more cpus. Each processor is capable of running different program simultaneously (true multitasking).

Multi-Processor (contd)

The cpus all shared the other parts of the computers: memory, disk system, bus, etc. Cpu communicate via memory and the system bus. Cheaper than cluster computers but does not perform as well.

Advantages of Parallel Processing

Costs are much cheaper than building one supercomputer.

Highly scalable.

Disadvantages of parallel processing.

High overload it is difficult to make many processor work together efficiently.

It is difficult to write programs to utilize multiple processors at once in an efficient manner.

References

www.anandtech.com http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/SUPERCOM.Ca lle.HTML http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~lee/cs147/Super %20Computers%20--Parallel%20Computers.ppt