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The Need for Supercomputers• Supercomputers allow large amounts of processing to be
dedicated to calculation-heavy problems• Supercomputers are centralized in one location, allowing for
high-speed communication within the computer• Specific Applications throughout the years:
o 1970s: Aerodynamic researcho 1980s: Radiation shielding modelingo 1990s: 3D nuclear test simulationso 2010s: Molecular Dynamics Simulation
• All applications would be difficult to simulate on individual machines
History of the Supercomputer: Origins• 1964 - Seymour Cray, working at
Control Data Corporation, puts together the CDC 6600
• At this time, machines used one CPU to drive entire system
• The CPC's CPUs handled only arithmetic and logic, letting Peripheral Processors (PP) handle I/O
• 6600 had one CPU and 10 PPs• System ran at 1 MFLOPS, world's
fastest computer from 1964 - 1969 -10 times faster than any machine of its time
• One hundred machines produced, sold for $8 Million each, defining the supercomputer market
History of the Supercomputer: Cray• In 1975, Seymour Cray and
Jim Thornton developed the 80 MHz Cray-1.
• The Cray-1 used vector processing, many registers, and pipelining for fast vector and scalar operations.
• Ran at 80 MFLOPS• Most successful
Supercomputer in history• Crays defined
supercomputers for much of the 70s and 80s
Cray-1 Supercomputer
History of the Supercomputer: Cray
• 64-bit System• 24-bit Addressing• 72-bit Word Length
(64-bit data, 8-bit parity check)
• 12 pipelined functional units
History of the Supercomputer: Multi- Processor
• At its peak in popularity, the best Cray supercomputer had at most 8 Cores
• The 90s introduced many multiprocessor systems including:o Fujitsu's Numerical Wind
Tunnel (166 Vector Processors, 280 GFLOPS)
o Hitachi SR2201 (2048 Processors, 600 GFLOPS)
• Inter-processor communication was crucial
• Developments in this area led to the ASCI Red, the first computer to beat 1 TFLOP
Examining part of the ASCI Red
History of the Supercomputer: Petascale
• Post-2000, the trend of many small units to achieve high performance continued, many systems consisting of many nodes with many processors
• Top Supercomputers of the last decade:o 2000 IBM ASCI White 7.226 TFLOPSo 2002 NEC Earth Simulator 35.86 TFLOPSo 2004 IBM Blue Gene/L 70.72TFLOPSo 2005 IBM Blue Gene/L 280.6 TFLOPSo 2007 IBM Blue Gene/L 478.2 TFLOPSo 2008 IBM Roadrunner 1.026 PFLOPSo 2009 Cray Jaguar 1.759 PFLOPSo 2010 Tianhe-IA 2.566 PFLOPSo 2011 Fujitsu K computer 10.51 PFLOPSo 2012 Cray Titan 20 PFLOPS
• Heat and power are becoming increasingly important - The K computer uses 12.6 MW, costing $970/hr to run, or 8.5 million dollars in a year.
Fujitsu K-Computer, individual rack
Cluster Computing• Clusters are a modern,
inexpensive solution to run high-processing power tasks
• Made from many cheap nodes, connected via ethernet
• Low-cost, commodity solutions
Supercomputers VSCluster Computing• Clusters are much cheaper and
easier to assemble vs supercomputers
• Supercomputers, due to their custom construction, can be designed to be much more power-efficient, and reach much higher speeds.
• Both design approaches have their uses in different circumstances
o Clusters are appropriate for many low-cost situations with a limited amount of software needed
o Supercomputers excel when max-performance is needed and custom software can be written
Supercomputer Node Communication• Mesh Network• Torus• Message Passing
Interface(Cray)• Wireless Network
on Chip�
Supercomputer Node Communication: Torus• Rectilinear array of
2 or more dimensions
• Processors connected to nearest neighbor
• Number of connections equals 2 times the dimension
Operating Systems used in Supercomputing• The first supercomputers used custom OS to
help increase performance. • Generic OS so began to overtake custom
made OS due to reduced cost.• Generic OS were tailored to specific
systems, depending on specifications• Multi-core systems sometimes run different
OS depending on what the core might be doing, EX: computing core or I/O core