PRIYADHARSHINI S

SUPERCOMPUTERS

OVERVIEW

The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems in existence at the time of their construction

Typically multi core Housed in large clean rooms with high air

flow to permit cooling Used to solve problems that are too

massive for standard computers

HISTORY First supercomputer built by Seymour Cray in

Control Data Corporation (CDC) in 1957 CDC 1604 one of the first computers to replace

vacuum tubes with transistors IBM responded with IBM 7030 (or Stretch) in 1961 In 1964, Cray’s CDC 6600 replaced Stretch as the

fastest computer on earth with 3 million floating-point operations per second (FLOPS)

The term supercomputer coined to describe CDC 6600

Cray-1 introduced in 1976, was the first successful implementation of vector processing (can operate on pairs of lists of numbers)

Cray was also one of the pioneers of multiprocessing, implemented in Cray X-MP introduced in 1982

W. Daniel Hillis, a graduate student at MIT eliminated the single CPU in favor of decentralized controls in 1983

Hillis’s CM-1(Connection Machine), introduced in 1985 utilized 65,536 inexpensive one-bit processors, grouped 16 to a chip, to achieve several billion FLOPS

Currently, there are supercomputers that exceed 1000 TFLOPS; the first having been built by IBM in 2008

FEATURES More than one CPU necessitated by physical

limits of circuit technology

Large storage capacity

Very fast input/output capability

Cryogenic fluids are used for cooling

Price tag ranges from $500,000 to millions of dollars

Linux and Unix are the most commonly used operating systems

Fortran is the language most preferred for scientific programming

ARCHITECTURE Most supercomputers are clusters of MIMD

multiprocessors, each processor of which is SIMD

A SIMD processor executes the same instruction on more than one set of data at the same time

MIMD is employed to achieve parallelism, by using a number of processors that function asynchronously and independently

APPLICATIONS

fluid dynamics weather patterns seismic activity prediction nuclear explosion dynamics human genome sequencing credit card transaction processing design and testing of modern aircraft molecular modeling cryptology

Supercomputers are used to perform the most compute-intensive tasks of modern times

First computer to defeat a world champion!!

Garry Kasparov

Deep Blue

In February 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated grandmaster Garry Kasparov. It was then assigned to predict the weather in Atlanta, Georgia, during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games

MANUFACTURERS IBM Aspen Systems SGI Cray Research Compaq Hewlett-Packard Thinking Machines Cray Computer Corporation Control Data Corporation

Cray-1

IBM Roadrunner

REFERENCES

http://www.infoweblinks.com/content/supercomputers.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

http://www.britannica.com

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/index.jsp