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For other uses, see Supercomputer (disambiguation).

A supercomputer is a computer that is considered at the time of its introduction to be at the frontline in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929[1] to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University. The New York World was a Newspaper published in New York from 1860 until 1931 See also Unit record equipment The tabulating machine was a machine designed to assist in Tabulations. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Columbia University is a private University in the United States and a member of the Ivy League.

Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. Seymour Roger Cray ( September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was a U Control Data Corporation (CDC, was one of the pioneering Supercomputer firms Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). Cray, himself, never used the word "supercomputer"; a little-remembered fact is that he only recognized the word "computer". In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in a parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". A minicomputer (colloquially mini) is a class of multi-user Computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum in between the largest Multi-user Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology

The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989.
The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989. The Cray-2 was a vector Supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985.

The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's ordinary computer. A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. Scalar processors represent the simplest class of Computer processors A scalar processor processes one data item at a time (typical data items being integers or In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Parallel processing is also another term for Parallel computing. Commercial off-the-shelf ( COTS) is a term for Software or Hardware, generally technology or computer products that are ready-made and available for sale (This is commonly and humorously referred to as the attack of the killer micros in the industry. ) Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Itanium, or x86-64, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects. A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated PowerPC is a RISC Instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple – IBM – Motorola alliance known as AIM Itanium is the brand name for 64-bit Intel Microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64) x86-64 is a Superset of the x86 instruction set architecture.

Contents

Software tools

Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM, and open source-based software solutions such as Beowulf, WareWulf and openMosix which facilitate the creation of a supercomputer from a collection of ordinary workstations or servers. Message Passing Interface ( MPI) is a specification for an API that allows many computers to communicate with one another Open source is a development methodology which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge Originally referring to a specific computer built in 1994 Beowulf is a class of Computer clusters similar to the original NASA system Warewulf is a Computer cluster Implementation Toolkit that facilitates the process of installing a cluster and long term administration openMosix was a free cluster management system that provides Single-system image (SSI capabilities e Technology like ZeroConf (Rendezvous/Bonjour) can be used to create ad hoc computer clusters for specialized software such as Apple's Shake compositing application. Zeroconf, or Zero Configuration Networking, is a set of techniques that automatically create a usable IP network without configuration or special servers Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics Shake is an image Compositing package used in the post-production industry An easy programming language for supercomputers remains an open research topic in computer science. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Several utilities that would once have cost several thousands of dollars are now completely free thanks to the open source community which often creates disruptive technology in this arena. A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a term describing a technological innovation product or service that uses a "disruptive" strategy rather than

Common uses

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Weather forecasting is the application of science and technology to predict the state of the atmosphere for a future time and a given location Global warming is the increase in the average measured temperature of the Computational chemistry is a branch of Chemistry that uses computers to assist in solving chemical problems A wind tunnel is a research tool developed to assist with studying the effects of air moving over or around solid objects A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from Nuclear reactions either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. In Physics and Nuclear chemistry, nuclear fusion is the process by which multiple- like charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden" and analýein, "to loosen" or "to untie" is the study of methods for Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.

A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources. Grand Challenges were USA policy terms set as goals in the late 1980s for funding high-performance computing and communications research in part in response to the Japanese

Relevant here is the distinction between capability computing and capacity computing, as defined by Graham et al. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can. Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve somewhat large problems or many small problems or to prepare for a run on a capability system.

Hardware and software design

Processor board of a CRAY YMP vector computer
Processor board of a CRAY YMP vector computer

Supercomputers using custom CPUs traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times — in fact, much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. The Hierarchical arrangement of storage in current Computer architectures is called the memory hierarchy. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing. In Computer networking and Computer science, digital bandwidth or just bandwidth is the capacity for a given system to transfer data over a connection For other meanings see the disambiguation page at Transaction.

As with all highly parallel systems, Amdahl's law applies, and supercomputer designs devote great effort to eliminating software serialization, and using hardware to address the remaining bottlenecks. Amdahl's law, also known as Amdahl's argument, is named after computer architect Gene Amdahl, and is used to find the maximum expected improvement In Engineering, bottleneck is a phenomenon by which the performance or capacity of an entire system is severely limited by a single component

Supercomputer challenges, technologies

Technologies developed for supercomputers include:

Processing techniques

Vector processing techniques were first developed for supercomputers and continue to be used in specialist high-performance applications. A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture ( NUMA) is a computer memory design used in Multiprocessors where the memory access In Computer data storage, data striping is the segmentation of logically sequential data such as a single file so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices RAID — which stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks,or alternatively Redundant Array of Independent Disks (a less specific name and thus now the In Computing, a file system (often also written as filesystem) is a method for storing and organizing Computer files and the data they contain to make A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design where the instruction set includes operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data Vector processing techniques have trickled down to the mass market in DSP architectures and SIMD processing instructions for general-purpose computers. In Computing, SIMD ( S ingle I nstruction M ultiple D ata is a technique employed to achieve data level parallelism as in a Vector

Modern video game consoles in particular use SIMD extensively and this is the basis for some manufacturers' claim that their game machines are themselves supercomputers. In Computing, SIMD ( S ingle I nstruction M ultiple D ata is a technique employed to achieve data level parallelism as in a Vector Indeed, some graphics cards have the computing power of several TeraFLOPS. A video card, also known as a graphics accelerator card, display adapter, or graphics card, is a hardware component whose function is to Measuring performance In order for FLOPS to be useful as a measure of floating-point performance a standard benchmark must be available on all computers of interest The applications to which this power can be applied was limited by the special-purpose nature of early video processing. As video processing has become more sophisticated, Graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved to become more useful as general-purpose vector processors, and an entire computer science sub-discipline has arisen to exploit this capability: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP² is the technique of using a GPU, which typically handles

Operating systems

Supercomputers predominantly run some variant of Linux or UNIX. Linux has been the most popular operating system since 2004
Supercomputers predominantly run some variant of Linux or UNIX. Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Linux has been the most popular operating system since 2004

Supercomputer operating systems, today most often variants of Linux or UNIX, are every bit as complex as those for smaller machines, if not more so. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Their user interfaces tend to be less developed, however, as the OS developers have limited programming resources to spend on non-essential parts of the OS (i. e. , parts not directly contributing to the optimal utilization of the machine's hardware). This stems from the fact that because these computers, often priced at millions of dollars, are sold to a very small market, their R&D budgets are often limited. (The advent of Unix and Linux allows reuse of conventional desktop software and user interfaces. )

Interestingly this has been a continuing trend throughout the supercomputer industry, with former technology leaders such as Silicon Graphics taking a back seat to such companies as AMD and NVIDIA, who have been able to produce cheap, feature-rich, high-performance, and innovative products due to the vast number of consumers driving their R&D. Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company The multinational NVIDIA Corporation ( (ɪnˈvɪdiə specializes in the manufacture of graphics-processor technologies for Workstations

Historically, until the early-to-mid-1980s, supercomputers usually sacrificed instruction set compatibility and code portability for performance (processing and memory access speed). An instruction set is a list of all the instructions and all their variations that a processor can execute For the most part, supercomputers to this time (unlike high-end mainframes) had vastly different operating systems. The Cray-1 alone had at least six different proprietary OSs largely unknown to the general computing community. Similarly different and incompatible vectorizing and parallelizing compilers for Fortran existed. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to This trend would have continued with the ETA-10 were it not for the initial instruction set compatibility between the Cray-1 and the Cray X-MP, and the adoption of UNIX operating system variants (such as Cray's Unicos and today's Linux. The ETA10 was a line of Supercomputers manufactured by ETA Systems (a spin-off division of CDC) in the 1980s and which implemented the Instruction set Unicos (officially all-caps UNICOS) is the name of a range of Unix Operating system variants developed by Cray for its Supercomputers )

For this reason, in the future, the highest performance systems are likely to have a UNIX flavor but with incompatible system-unique features (especially for the highest-end systems at secure facilities).

Programming

The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Special-purpose Fortran compilers can often generate faster code than C or C++ compilers, so Fortran remains the language of choice for scientific programming, and hence for most programs run on supercomputers. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to tags please moot on the talk page first! --> In Computing, C is a general-purpose cross-platform block structured C++ (" C Plus Plus " ˌsiːˌplʌsˈplʌs is a general-purpose Programming language. To exploit the parallelism of supercomputers, programming environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are being used. Message Passing Interface ( MPI) is a specification for an API that allows many computers to communicate with one another The OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing is an Application programming interface (API that supports multi-platform Shared memory Multiprocessing programming

Modern supercomputer architecture

The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center
The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center
The CPU Architecture Share of Top500 Rankings between 1998 and 2007: x86 family includes x86-64.
The CPU Architecture Share of Top500 Rankings between 1998 and 2007: x86 family includes x86-64. Columbia is a Supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA. See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal x86-64 is a Superset of the x86 instruction set architecture.

As of November 2006, the top ten supercomputers on the Top500 list (and indeed the bulk of the remainder of the list) have the same top-level architecture. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known Computer systems in the world Each of them is a cluster of MIMD multiprocessors, each processor of which is SIMD. In Computing, MIMD ( M ultiple I nstruction stream M ultiple D ata stream is a technique employed to achieve parallelism In Computing, SIMD ( S ingle I nstruction M ultiple D ata is a technique employed to achieve data level parallelism as in a Vector The supercomputers vary radically with respect to the number of multiprocessors per cluster, the number of processors per multiprocessor, and the number of simultaneous instructions per SIMD processor. Within this hierarchy we have:

As of November 2007 the fastest machine is Blue Gene/L. Blue Gene is a Computer architecture project designed to produce several Supercomputers designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS This machine is a cluster of 65,536 computers, each with two processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently. By contrast, Columbia is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently. Columbia is a Supercomputer built by Silicon Graphics for NASA.

As of 2005, Moore's Law and economies of scale are the dominant factors in supercomputer design: a single modern desktop PC is now more powerful than a 15-year old supercomputer, and the design concepts that allowed past supercomputers to out-perform contemporaneous desktop machines have now been incorporated into commodity PCs. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. Moore's law describes an important trend in the History of computer hardware. Furthermore, the costs of chip development and production make it uneconomical to design custom chips for a small run and favor mass-produced chips that have enough demand to recoup the cost of production. A current model quad-core Xeon workstation running at 2. 66 GHz will outperform a multimillion dollar Cray C90 supercomputer used in the early 1990s, lots of workloads requiring such a supercomputer in the 1990s can now be done on workstations costing less than 4,000 US dollars.

Additionally, many problems carried out by supercomputers are particularly suitable for parallelization (in essence, splitting up into smaller parts to be worked on simultaneously) and, particularly, fairly coarse-grained parallelization that limits the amount of information that needs to be transferred between independent processing units. For this reason, traditional supercomputers can be replaced, for many applications, by "clusters" of computers of standard design which can be programmed to act as one large computer.

Special-purpose supercomputers

Special-purpose supercomputers are high-performance computing devices with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom VLSI chips, allowing higher price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. FPGAs should not be confused with the Flip-chip pin grid array, a form of integrated circuit packaging They are used for applications such as astrophysics computation and brute-force codebreaking. Astrophysics is the branch of Astronomy that deals with the Physics of the Universe, including the physical properties ( Luminosity, Cryptanalysis (from the Greek kryptós, "hidden" and analýein, "to loosen" or "to untie" is the study of methods for Historically a new special-purpose supercomputer has occasionally been faster than the world's fastest general-purpose supercomputer, by some measure. For example, GRAPE-6 was faster than the Earth Simulator in 2002 for a particular special set of problems.

Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:

The fastest supercomputers today

Measuring supercomputer speed

The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (1012 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-, combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (1015 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops. Deep Blue is a Chess - playing Computer developed by IBM. On 11 May 1997, the machine won a six-game match by two wins to Chess is a recreational and competitive Game played between two players. Reconfigurable computing is a computing paradigm combining some of the flexibility of software with the high performance of hardware by processing with very flexible high speed computing Gravity Pipe, otherwise known as GRAPE is a project which uses Hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. In Cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed " Deep Crack " is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF to perform a The Data Encryption Standard ( DES) is a Cipher (a method for Encrypting information selected by NBS as an official Federal Information In Cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an Algorithm for performing Encryption and Decryption &mdash a series of well-defined steps MDGRAPE-3 is an ultra-high performance Supercomputer system developed by the RIKEN research institute in Japan. Measuring performance In order for FLOPS to be useful as a measure of floating-point performance a standard benchmark must be available on all computers of interest An SI prefix (also known as a metric prefix) is a name or associated symbol that precedes a unit of measure (or its symbol to form a Decimal multiple or teras- (symbol T) is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 1012, or 1000000000000 (1 trillion In Physics and Mathematics, peta- (symbol P) is a prefix in the SI ( System of units) denoting 1015 ) This measurement is based on a particular benchmark which does LU decomposition of a large matrix. Measurement is the process of estimating the magnitude of some attribute of an object such as its length or weight relative to some standard ( unit of measurement) such as This article is about the use of benchmarks in computing for other uses see Benchmark. In Linear algebra, the LU decomposition is a Matrix decomposition which writes a matrix as the product of a lower and upper Triangular matrix This mimics a class of real-world problems, but is significantly easier to compute than a majority of actual real-world problems.

The Top500 list

Main article: TOP500

Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the Top500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known Computer systems in the world The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known Computer systems in the world LINPACK is a software library for performing numerical Linear algebra on digital computers The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is the best current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time.

Current fastest supercomputer system

A BlueGene/P node card
A BlueGene/P node card

On June 8, 2008, the Cell/AMD Opteron-based IBM Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was announced as the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 1. Roadrunner is a Supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a 026 PFLOPS. [2][3] However, Roadrunner was then taken out of service to be shipped to its new home. Press reports are unclear as to whether Roadrunner can be considered a general-purpose supercomputer. (currently this system is not yet included in the TOP500 listing below, since the 31st list will only be updated during the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) on June 17, 2008. )

Quasi-supercomputing

Some types of large-scale distributed computing for embarrassingly parallel problems take the clustered supercomputing concept to an extreme. Distributed computing deals with Hardware and Software Systems containing more than one processing element or Storage element concurrent In the jargon of Parallel computing, an embarrassingly parallel workload (or embarrassingly parallel problem is one for which no particular effort is needed to segment the problem

One such example is the BOINC platform, a host for a number of distributed computing projects. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ( BOINC) is a non-commercial Middleware system for volunteer and Grid computing. On March 16, 2008, BOINC recorded a processing power of over 960 TFLOPS through over 550,000 active computers on the network. Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common [4] The largest project, SETI@home, reported processing power of over 450 TFLOPS through almost 350,000 active computers. SETI@home ("SETI at home" is a Distributed computing ( Grid computing) project using Internet -connected computers hosted by the Space [5]

Another distributed computing project, Folding@home, reported nearly 1. Folding@home (sometimes abbreviated as FAH or F@h) is a Distributed computing (DC project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations 3 PFLOPS of processing power in late September 2007. A little over 1 PFLOPS of this processing power is contributed by clients running on PlayStation 3 systems. [6]

GIMPS's distributed Mersenne Prime search achieves currently 29 TFLOPS (as of May 2008). The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ( GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use Prime95 and MPrime Computer software that can In Mathematics, a Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a Power of two: M_n=2^n-1

Google's search engine system may be faster with estimated total processing power of between 126 and 316 TFLOPS. Google Inc is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online Google requires large computational resources in order to provide their service The New York Times estimates that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers. The Googleplex is the Company headquarters for Google Inc, located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, A server farm or server cluster is a collection of Computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability [7]

Research and development

On September 9, 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer to use the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell B. Events 1000 - Battle of Svolder, Viking Age. 1379 - Treaty of Neuberg, splitting the Austrian Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. The United States Department of Energy ( DOE) is a Cabinet -level department of the United States government responsible for energy policy The United States National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA is part of the United States Department of Energy. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology E. ) processor aiming to produce a machine capable of a sustained speed of up to 1,000 trillion (one quadrillion) calculations per second, or one PFLOPS. Another project in development by IBM is the Cyclops64 architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip". Cyclops64 (formerly known as Blue Gene /C) is a Cellular architecture in development by IBM.

Other PFLOP projects include one by Dr. Narendra Karmarkar[8] in India, a CDAC effort targeted for 2010,[9] and the Blue Waters Petascale Computing System funded by the NSF ($200 million) that is being built by the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (slated to be completed by 2011). Narendra K Karmarkar (born 1957 is an Indian mathematician renowned for developing Karmarkar's algorithm. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing ( C-DAC) is a scientific society of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India. The National Science Foundation (NSF is a United States Government agency that supports fundamental Research and Education in all the non-medical The National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA) is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation 's Supercomputer Centers Program and a This article is about the flagship campus For other uses and locations of University of Illinois, see University of Illinois (disambiguation The University of [10]

Timeline of supercomputers

This is a list of the record-holders for fastest general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the year each one set the record. For entries prior to 1993, this list refers to various sources. From 1993 to present, the list reflects the Top500 listing, and the "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known Computer systems in the world

Year Supercomputer Peak speed
(Rmax)		 Location
1942 Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) 30 OPS Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
TRE Heath Robinson 200 OPS Bletchley Park
1944 Flowers Colossus 5 kOPS Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, UK
1946
 		 UPenn ENIAC
(before 1948+ modifications)		 100 kOPS Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA
 
1954 IBM NORC 67 kOPS U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, USA
1956 MIT TX-0 83 kOPS Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA
1958 IBM AN/FSQ-7 400 kOPS 25 U.S. Air Force sites across the continental USA and 1 site in Canada (52 computers)
1960 UNIVAC LARC 250 kFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1961 IBM 7030 "Stretch" 1. The Atanasoff–Berry Computer ( ABC) was the first electronic Digital Computing device The Iowa State University of Science and Technology, more commonly known as Iowa State University (ISU is a public land-grant and space-grant university Ames is a city located in the central part of the US state of Iowa, and is approximately 30 miles north of Des Moines in Story County. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE was established in Worth Matravers, which is four miles to the west of Swanage, UK in May 1940 Heath Robinson was a machine used by British Codebreakers at Bletchley Park during World War II to solve messages in a German Teleprinter cipher Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, and (since 1967 part of Milton Keynes Thomas (Tommy Harold Flowers MBE ( 22 December 1905 &ndash 28 October 1998) was an English engineer The Colossus machines were electronic Computing devices used by British codebreakers to read Encrypted German messages during The Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, London, was first established in 1921 and opened by the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1933 Dollis Hill is an area of north-west London. It lies close to Willesden, in the London Borough of Brent. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn) is a private University located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first general-purpose electronic Computer. Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG is a United States Army facility located near Aberdeen Maryland (in Harford County) The United States of America —commonly referred to as the International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator ( NORC) was a one-of-a-kind first-generation ( Vacuum tube) electronic Computer built by IBM for the The United States Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD, named for Rear Admiral John A Dahlgren is a Census-designated place (CDP in King George County, Virginia, United States. The Commonwealth of Virginia ( is an American state The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The TX-0, for T ransistorized E' x' perimental computer zero but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh" Lexington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts ( is a state located in the New England region of the northeastern United States. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology The term continental United States refers to the 48 contiguous states located on the North American continent south of the border with Canada plus the District Country to "Dominion of Canada" or "Canadian Federation" or anything else please read the Talk Page UNIVAC serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name which through mergers and acquisitions underwent The UNIVAC LARC ( Livermore Advanced Research Computer) was Remington Rand's first attempt at building a Supercomputer. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM 's first Transistorized Supercomputer. 2 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1964 CDC 6600 3 MFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1969 CDC 7600 36 MFLOPS
1974 CDC STAR-100 100 MFLOPS
1975 Burroughs ILLIAC IV 150 MFLOPS NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA
1976 Cray-1 250 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA (80+ sold worldwide)
1981 CDC Cyber 205 400 MFLOPS (numerous sites worldwide)
1983 Cray X-MP/4 941 MFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Battelle; Boeing
1984 M-13 2. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a New Mexico ( is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States of America. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The CDC 6600 was a Mainframe computer from Control Data Corporation, first delivered in 1964. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The CDC 7600 was the Seymour Cray -designed successor to the CDC 6600, extending Control Data 's dominance of the Supercomputer field into the The STAR-100 was a Supercomputer from Control Data Corporation (CDC one of the first machines to use a Vector processor for improved math performance The Burroughs Corporation began in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company in St ILLIAC IV was one of the most infamous Supercomputers ever in a series of research machines ILLIACs, from the University of Illinois. NASA Ames Research Center (ARC is a NASA facility located at Moffett Federal Airfield, which covers 43 acres at the borders of the cities of Mountain View California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The Cray-1 was a Supercomputer designed by a team including Seymour Cray for Cray Research. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a New Mexico ( is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States of America. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The CDC Cyber range of mainframe -class Supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC during the 1970s and 1980s The Cray X-MP was a Supercomputer designed built and sold by Cray Research. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 The Battelle Memorial Institute is a private not-for-profit applied science and technology development company headquartered in Columbus Ohio. The Boeing Company is a major Aerospace and defense corporation originally founded by William E 4 GFLOPS Scientific Research Institute of Computer Complexes, Moscow, USSR
1985 Cray-2/8 3. Moscow (Москва́ romanised: Moskvá, IPA: see also other names) is the Capital and the largest city of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR was a constitutionally Socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991 The Cray-2 was a vector Supercomputer made by Cray Research starting in 1985. 9 GFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1989 ETA10-G/8 10. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the The ETA10 was a line of Supercomputers manufactured by ETA Systems (a spin-off division of CDC) in the 1980s and which implemented the Instruction set 3 GFLOPS Florida State University, Florida, USA
1990 NEC SX-3/44R 23. Florida State University (commonly referred to as Florida State or FSU) is a public Research University located in Tallahassee Florida ( is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States, bordering Alabama to the northwest and Georgia to the The United States of America —commonly referred to as the is a Japanese multinational IT company headquartered in Minato Tokyo, Japan. 2 GFLOPS NEC Fuchu Plant, Fuchu, Japan
1993 Thinking Machines CM-5/1024 65. is a Japanese multinational IT company headquartered in Minato Tokyo, Japan. is the name of several places in Japan: Fuchū Tokyo, a city in Tokyo Metropolis Fuchū Hiroshima, a city in Hiroshima Prefecture For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. Thinking Machines Corporation was a Supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham Massachusetts in 1982 by W The Connection Machine was a series of Supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional 5 GFLOPS Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Security Agency
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 124. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL (previously known at various times as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a The National Security Agency/ Central Security Service ( NSA/CSS) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States government is a Japanese company specializing in Semiconductors Computers ( Supercomputers Personal computers, servers, Telecommunications 50 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
Intel Paragon XP/S 140 143. The Nationaal Lucht- en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium (NLR is the National Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands and is one of the Major Technological Institutes of the country officially, is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan and located on the eastern side of the main island Honshū. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. The Intel Paragon was a series of Massively parallel Supercomputers produced by Intel. 40 GFLOPS Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994 Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel 170. Sandia National Laboratories which is managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation) is a major United New Mexico ( is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States of America. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the is a Japanese company specializing in Semiconductors Computers ( Supercomputers Personal computers, servers, Telecommunications 40 GFLOPS National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996 Hitachi SR2201/1024 220. The Nationaal Lucht- en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium (NLR is the National Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands and is one of the Major Technological Institutes of the country officially, is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan and located on the eastern side of the main island Honshū. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. () is a Multinational corporation specializing in high-technology and services headquartered in Marunouchi Itchome Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. 4 GFLOPS University of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi/Tsukuba CP-PACS/2048 368. The, abbreviated as, is a major Research university located in Tokyo, Japan. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. () is a Multinational corporation specializing in high-technology and services headquartered in Marunouchi Itchome Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. is a city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. It is known as the location of the, a Planned city developed in the 1960s 2 GFLOPS Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997 Intel ASCI Red/9152 1. The is located in the city of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture in the Kantō region The University has 28 college clusters and schools with a total of around 15000 students is a city located in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. It is known as the location of the, a Planned city developed in the 1960s For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a Supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque New Mexico. 338 TFLOPS Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999 Intel ASCI Red/9632 2. Sandia National Laboratories which is managed and operated by the Sandia Corporation (a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation) is a major United New Mexico ( is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States of America. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the ASCI Red or ASCI Option Red, was a Supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque New Mexico. 3796 TFLOPS
2000 IBM ASCI White 7. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology ASCI White was a Supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. 226 TFLOPS Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002 NEC Earth Simulator 35. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the is a Japanese multinational IT company headquartered in Minato Tokyo, Japan. The Earth Simulator ( ES) was the fastest Supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004 86 TFLOPS Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama, Japan
2004 IBM Blue Gene/L 70. The Earth Simulator ( ES) was the fastest Supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004 is the capital of Kanagawa Prefecture, located in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshū and is a major commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Japan topics. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Blue Gene is a Computer architecture project designed to produce several Supercomputers designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS 72 TFLOPS U.S. Department of Energy/IBM, USA
2005 136. The United States Department of Energy ( DOE) is a Cabinet -level department of the United States government responsible for energy policy International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology The United States of America —commonly referred to as the 8 TFLOPS U.S. Department of Energy/U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
280. The United States Department of Energy ( DOE) is a Cabinet -level department of the United States government responsible for energy policy The United States National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA is part of the United States Department of Energy. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LLNL) in Livermore California is a scientific research laboratory founded by the University of California in 1952 California ( is a US state on the West Coast of the United States, along the Pacific Ocean. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the 6 TFLOPS
2007 478. 2 TFLOPS

See also

General concepts, history
Other classes of computer
Supercomputer companies in operation

These companies make supercomputer hardware and/or software, either as their sole activity, or as one of several activities. Originally referring to a specific computer built in 1994 Beowulf is a class of Computer clusters similar to the original NASA system Distributed computing deals with Hardware and Software Systems containing more than one processing element or Storage element concurrent A flash mob computing (also flash mob computer) is a temporary ad-hoc Computer cluster running specific Software to coordinate the individual Computers Grid computing is a form of Distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked loosely-coupled High-performance computing (HPC uses Supercomputers and Computer clusters to solve advanced computing problems The history of computer hardware encompasses the hardware, its architecture, and its impact on software. MOSIX is a management system for Linux clusters and organizational Grids that provides a Single-system image (SSI i Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many instructions are carried out simultaneously operating on the principle that large problems can often Metacomputing is all Computing and computing-oriented activity which involves computing Knowledge (science and technology common for the research development A quantum computer is a device for Computation that makes direct use of distinctively Quantum mechanical Phenomena, such as superposition Minisupercomputers constituted a class of Computers that emerged in the mid-1980s Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as Big Iron) are Computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications typically bulk data A minicomputer (colloquially mini) is a class of multi-user Computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum in between the largest Multi-user microcomputer is a Computer with a Microprocessor as its Central processing unit.

Defunct supercomputer companies

These companies have either folded, or no longer operate in the supercomputer market. Cray Inc ( is a Supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle Washington. is a Japanese company specializing in Semiconductors Computers ( Supercomputers Personal computers, servers, Telecommunications Groupe Bull (also known as Bull Information Systems or simply Bull) is a French owned Computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS is software designed to allow servers to work together as Computer cluster, to provide failover and increased availability of applications or nCUBE was a series of Parallel computing computers from the company of the same name is a Japanese multinational IT company headquartered in Minato Tokyo, Japan. The multinational NVIDIA Corporation ( (ɪnˈvɪdiə specializes in the manufacture of graphics-processor technologies for Workstations This is an article about the computing company for use in mathematics see Quadric. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company Three firms have held simultaneously the name Supercomputer Systems or Supercomputing Systems.

Notes

  1. ^ Eames, Charles; Eames, Ray (1973). Three firms have held simultaneously the name Supercomputer Systems or Supercomputing Systems. Thinking Machines Corporation was a Supercomputer manufacturer founded in Waltham Massachusetts in 1982 by W A Computer Perspective. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 95.  . Page 95 identifies the article as "Super Computing Machines Shown", New York World, March 1, 1920.  . However the article shown on page 95 references the Statistical Bureau in Hamilton Hall and an article at the Columbia Computing History web site states that such did not exist until 1929. See The Columbia Difference Tabulator - 1931
  2. ^ June 2008. cnet. com. Retrieved on 2008-06-09. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 53 - Roman Emperor Nero marries Claudia Octavia 62 - Claudia Octavia commits
  3. ^ New York Times, June 9, 2008
  4. ^ BOINCstats: BOINC Combined. BOINC. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing ( BOINC) is a non-commercial Middleware system for volunteer and Grid computing. Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
  5. ^ BOINCstats: SETI@Home. BOINC. Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
  6. ^ Folding@home: OS Statistics. Stanford University. Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private Research university located in
  7. ^ Markoff, John; Saul Hensell (June 14, 2006). John Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a Journalist best known for his work at the The New York Times, and a book and series of articles "Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power". The New York Times. Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
  8. ^ Athley, Gouri Agtey; Rajeshwari Adappa (30 Oct, 2006). "Tatas get Karmakar to make super comp". The Economic Times. The Economic Times, launched in 1961 is India's largest financial daily and the world's second largest financial daily after The Wall Street Journal, Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king
  9. ^ C-DAC's Param programme sets to touch 10 teraflops by late 2007 and a petaflops by 2010.
  10. ^ "National Science Board Approves Funds for Petascale Computing Systems". U. S. National Science Foundation (August 10, 2007). The National Science Foundation (NSF is a United States Government agency that supports fundamental Research and Education in all the non-medical Retrieved on 2008-03-16. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common Events 597 BC - Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king

External links

Information resources

Supercomputing centers, organizations

Organizations

Centers

Specific machines, general-purpose

Specific machines, special-purpose


Linköping University (Linköpings universitet LiU is a University in Linköping, Sweden. "Sverige" redirects here For other uses see Sweden (disambiguation and Sverige (disambiguation.

Dictionary

supercomputer

-noun

  1. (computing) Any computer that has a far greater processing power than others of its day; typically they use more than 1 core and are housed in large clean rooms with high air flow to permit cooling. Typical uses are weather forecasting, nuclear simulations and animations.
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