Supercomputer

Definition:

A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for
computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large
databases or do a great amount of computation (or both).

A Supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of contemporary processing

capacity-particularly speed of calculation which can happen in nanoseconds.
Supercomputers were introduced in 1960s made initially and, for decades,
primarily by Seymour Cray at the CDC (Control Data Corporation) , Cray Research
and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While
supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines
with thousands of processors began to appear and in the 20th century computers
of ten thousands of off the shelf processors were the norm. As of today Chinas
Tianhe II is the faster with 33.86 petaFLOPS (Floating-point Operations Per
Second) (peta flop is
FLOPS).
At any given time, there are usually a few well-publicized supercomputers
that operate at extremely high speeds. The term is also sometimes applied to far
slower (but still impressively fast) computers. Most supercomputers are really
multiple computers that perform parallel processing. In general, there are two
parallel processing approaches: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively
parallel processing (MPP).
These supercomputers consists of multicore processors. The use of multi
core processors combine with centralization is an emerging trend: one can think
of this as a small cluster that bith depends upon and contributes to the cloud.

History:
The history of supercomputing goes back to 1960s, with the Atlas at the
University of Manchester and a series of computers at CDC. These used
innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak
performance.

The Atlas was designed to operate at processing approaching one million

instructions per second. It was commissioned on 7 December 1962 as one of the
worlds first supercomputers and was equivalent to four IBM 7094s.
The CDC 6600, released in 1964, was designed by Cray to be the fastest in
the world by a large margin. Cray switched from germanium to silicon transistors,
which he ran very fast, solving the overheating problem by introducing
refrigeration. Given that the 6600 outran all computers of the time by about 10
times, it was dubbed a supercomputer and defined the supercomputing market
when one hundred computers were sold at $8 million each.
Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company. Four years after leaving
CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it became one of the most
successful supercomputers in history. The Cray-2 released in 1985 was an 8
processor liquid cooled computer and Fluorinert was pumped through it as it
operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest until 1990.
In 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear both in
the United States and in Japan, setting new computational performance records.
Fijitsus Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to
gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processors . The
Hitachi SR2201 obtained peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using
2048 processors connected via fast three-dimensional crossbar network. The Intel
Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations,
and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD
machine which connected processors via a high speed two dimensional mesh,
allowing processes to execute on separate nodes; communicating via the
Message Passing Interface.

Hardware and architecture:

Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since
the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s. Early supercomputer
architects relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve
superior computational peak performance. However, in time the demand for
increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems.

When the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors , but in
the later stages machines with thousands of processors began to appear.
Supercomputers of the 21st century can use over 100,000 processors connected
by fast connections.
The management of heat density , a key issue of centralized computers ,
was done by pumping Fluorinert through the system, to a hybrid liquid air cooling
system with normal air conditioning temperatures.
Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two
paths. In the grid computing approach, the processing power of a large number of
computers, organised as distributed, diverse administrative domains, is
opportunistically used whenever a computer is available. In another approach, a
large number of processors are used in close proximity to each other, e.g. in a
computer cluster. In such a centralized massively parallel system the speed and
flexibility of the interconnect becomes very important and modern
supercomputers have used various approaches ranging from enhanced Infiniband
systems to three-dimensional torus interconnects. The use of multi-core
processors combined with centralization is an emerging direction, e.g. as in the
Cyclops64 system.
As the price/performance of GPGPUs (general purpose graphic processors)
has improved , Tianhe-1 and nebulae are relied on them, but there are
conventional computers like K computers. A number of special purpose
computers are designed to solve one problem. Examples of special purpose
computers are Belle, Deep Blue and Hydra for playing Chess, Gravity and Pipe for
astrophysics.

Energy usage and heat management:

A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power,
almost all of which is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe1A consumes 4.04 Megawatts of electricity.[44] The cost to power and cool the
system can be significant, e.g. 4MW at $0.10/kWh is $400 an hour or about $3.5
million per year.