SUPERCOMPUTERS
PRIYADHARSHINI S
OVERVIEW
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The term is commonly applied to the fastest
high-performance systems in existence at
the time of their construction
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Typically multi core
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Housed in large clean rooms with high air
flow to permit cooling
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Used to solve problems that are too
massive for standard computers
HISTORY
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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 floatingpoint 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
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FEATURES
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More than one CPU necessitated by physical
limits of circuit technology
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Large storage capacity
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Very fast input/output capability
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Cryogenic fluids are used for cooling
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Price tag ranges from $500,000 to millions of
dollars
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Linux and Unix are the most commonly used
operating systems
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Fortran is the language most preferred for
scientific programming
ARCHITECTURE
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Most supercomputers are clusters of MIMD
multiprocessors, each processor of which is
SIMD
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A SIMD processor executes the same
instruction on more than one set of data at
the same time
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MIMD is employed to achieve parallelism, by
using a number of processors that function
asynchronously and independently
APPLICATIONS
Supercomputers are used to perform the most
compute-intensive tasks of modern times
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
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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
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IBM
Aspen Systems
SGI
Cray Research
Compaq
Hewlett-Packard
Thinking Machines
Cray Computer Corporation
Control Data Corporation
Cray-1
IBM Roadrunner
REFERENCES
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http://www.infoweblinks.com/content/supercomputers.htm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
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http://www.britannica.com
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http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/computers/gallery/index.jsp