Supercomputers
- 1. SUPERCOMPUTERS A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s.
- 2. WHAT GENERALLY IS A “SUPERCOMPUTER”? Supercomputers are the category of computers that include the fastest and most powerful processors. They are designed to solve complex mathematical equations and computational problems very quickly
- 3. USES OF SUPERCOMPUTERS Nuclear Simulation Structural Analysis Crash Analysis Climatic Predictions Cryptography Computational Chemistry
- 4. 21ST CENTURY SUPERCOMPUTING ARCHITECTURAL TRENDS The air cooled IBM Blue Gene supercomputer architecture trades processor speed for low power consumption so that a larger number of processors can be used at room temperature, by using normal air- conditioning. The second generation Blue Gene/P system is distinguished by the fact that each chip can act as a 4-way symmetric multiprocessor and also includes the logic for node-to-node communication. And at 371 MFLOPS/W the system is very energy efficient.
- 5. The K computer is a water-cooled, homogeneous processor, distributed memory system with a cluster architecture. It uses more than 80,000 SPARC-based processors, each with eight cores, for a total of over 700,000 cores – almost twice as many as any other system. It comprises more than 800 cabinets, each with 96 computing nodes (each with 16 GB of memory), and 6 I/O nodes. Although it is more powerful than the next five systems on the TOP500 list combined, at 824.56 MFLOPS/W it has the lowest power to performance ratio of any current major supercomputer system. The follow up system for the K computer, called the PRIMEHPC FX10 uses the same 6 dimensional torus interconnect, but still only one SPARC processor per node.
- 6. Unlike the K computer, the Tianhe-1A system uses a hybrid architecture and integrates CPUs and GPUs. It uses more than 14,000 Xeon general-purpose processors and more than 7,000 Nvidia Tesla graphic-based processors on about 3,500 blades. It has 112 computer cabinets and 262 terabytes of distributed memory; 2 petabytes of disk storage is implemented via Lustre clustered files. Tianhe-1 uses a proprietary high- speed communication network to connect the processors. The proprietary interconnect network was based on the Infiniband QDR, enhanced with Chinese made FeiTeng-1000 CPUs. In the case of the interconnect the system is twice as fast as the Infiniband, but slower than some interconnects on other supercomputers.