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Supercomputers

Supercomputers also called monsters, are the largest, most powerful and expensive type of digital computers available today. They are often used for scientific research and weather forcasting.

This lecture focuses on:

  1. What are supercompuers used for
  2. What operating systems do they use?
  3. How do they program supercomputers?
  4. How do we measure its speed
  5. Supercomputers vs. the human brain
  6. A bit of History

Introduction

An early supercomputer
 Cray supercomputer

Supercomputers were originally developed for code cracking, as well as ballistics and they are also used for those very same reasons today but the range of applications is increasing. They are made up of thousands of powerful processors and have the ability to handle massive amounts of data for climate analysis, molecular modeling and even nuclear explosion simulation.

Frontier holds the stop spot among supercomputers in 2023. It ranks as the fastest AI system on the planet. This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a performance exceeding one Exaflop/s. It is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, where it is operated for the Department of Energy (DOE). It currently has achieved 1.194 Exaflop/s using 8,699,904 cores. The HPE Cray EX architecture combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI, with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and Slingshot-11 interconnect. More About Frontier

What operating systems do supercomputers use?

Supercomputers today most often use variants of Linux as its OS. Linux is a free Unix-like operating system kernel created by Linus Torvalds.

How do they program supercomputers?

The most powerful computer on earth - 2012
 Titan

The base languages used to program supercomputers are Fortran or C. These languages are also used to program microcomputers.

How do we measure its speed

The fastest computer have their speed measured in petaflops. A petaflop can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. Can you think about that for a while? Just how many zeros will you use for 1 petaflop?

Supercomputers vs. the human brain

This statement was made by the director of cognitive computing at IBM Almaden Research Center : "We have no computers today that can begin to approach the awesome power of the human mind," .... Dharmendra Modha

A bit of History

Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2 (2013)

In June 17th 2013 this supercomputer was the world's fastest. It was developed by China′s National University of Defense Technology, with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s.

Titan (2012)

The Titan supercomputer is an upgrade of the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge. It uses graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as conventional central processing units (CPUs).Titan's performance on the TOP500's benchmark test was 17.59 petaflops, about 17,590 trillion calculations each second.

K Computer (June 2011)

Made in Japan and manufactured by Fujitsu. It's speed is 8.162 quadrillion calculations per second. It has a water cooling system which minimizes failure rate and power consumption.

Jaguar (June 2009)

The Jaguar is a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge,Tennessee, USA. In November 2009, it was named as the world's fastest computer.

RoadRunner(2008)

Roadrunner has a total of 6912 Opteron processors (6480 computation, 432 operation),Speed 1.042 petaflops,memory 103.6 TiB,space 6,000 sq ft), Linux OS, cost USD $133M. In November 2008, it reached a top performance of 1.456 petaflops.

BlueGene (2005)

IBM‘s BlueGene supercomputer,developed in 2004 one of the world‘s most powerful, has a computational capability of 92 trillion operations per second and 8 terabytes of storage.)

The Earth Simulator (2002 to 2004)

The Earth Simulator (ES) was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. It is capable of 35.86 trillion (35,860,000,000,000) floating-point calculations per second, or 35.86 TFLOPS.With a total of 5120 processors and 10 tebibytes of memory.The system has 700 terabytes of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage in tape drives

The Param 8000 (1991)

India's first supercomputer.Designed with 8000 transputers for parallel computing. This machine has 64 CPUs.

Test Yourself

Choose the correct answer
Questions Options Verify
 1)  Supercomputers are often used for wordprocessing True False
 2)  You can find a supercomputer at the supermarket True False
 3)  Supercomputers are called monsters True False
 4)  Supercompuers are smarter than people. True False

Assignment

You need to be online for this activity. Use any search engine with which you are familiar.

  1. What are the names of the three fastest computers available today?
  2. Where are they located?
  3. What are they used for?
  4. Has India or China developed their own supercomputer? If so state when.
  5. Where was the Jaguar supercomputer created?