Brief History
• Major Computers/Developers
• Technologies
Modern Uses
• Tasks Performed
• Relevant Fields
Architecture
• Massive Parallelism
• Hybrid Architecture
IBM Watson
• Hardware
• Artificial Intelligence
CRAY XK6
• Hardware
• Gemini Interconnect
1E+16
Power of Historical Computers (FLOPS)
1E+14
1E+12
1E+10
1E+08
1E+06
* Numbers from Extremetech.com and IPSJ Computer Museum
1970/80s
• Control Data
Corporation
• Cray
Research
• (NASA)
1990s
•
•
•
•
•
Fujitsu
NEC
Hitachi
Intel
Off-the-shelf
Development
2000s
• IBM
• China
PRIMARY USES:
Research Tools
• Large amounts of data
Simulations &
Models
• Nuclear weapons
• Modeling movement of
atoms and molecules
Brute Force
Calculations
• Decryption
SUPERCOMPUTERS are used in a variety of fields
High
Performance
• High amount of
FLOPS
• Gigaflops
High
Reliability
• Low Average
Temperature
• Stable State
• Error Recovery
Function
• Little to no
interruption of
instructions
• Redundancy
Low Power
Consumption
• Smaller Chips
• 45 nanometer or
less
• Individual CPU power
consumption is
important to whole
system
3-4GHz limit
on processors
To increase
performance…
PARALLELISM
• We had to re-think the way we wrote programs
• Sequential code vs. Parallel code
• Performance limited by sequential code
• Amdahl’s Law
• Supercomputers have many hardware components
• Applications must be designed for massive parallelism
1970s
• Multiple
Vector
processors
1980s
• Many singlecore
processors
• Massively
parallel
1990s-now
• Computer
clusters of x86
based servers
• Many multicore
processors
MASSIVE PARALLELISM
CPU ONLY
Thousands of multi-core
processors
Massively Parallel
HYBRID
Thousands of multi-core
processors
Accelerators
General Purpose Graphics
Accelerators (GPGPU)
Millions of cores including
both CPU and GPU cores
General Purpose Graphics Accelerators
More Processing
Cores
Power Efficiency
Higher
Performance
Low Cost
Difficult to
Program For
• Won Jeopardy!
• Greatest technological
breakthrough of the century
• Natural Language
Processing (NLP)
• Decision support tool
• Paradigm shift
• Implications for society
* Image Courtesy of IBM
Ninety IBM Power
750 Servers
(ten server racks)
16 TB Main
Memory
4 TB clustered
storage
• Each server has four
Power7 Processors
• 8 Cores each
• 3.55 GHz clock frequency
2880 Power7 Cores
80 Teraflops
(trillion floating-point
operations per second)
Workload
Optimized
• Massively Parallel
• Tuned for the task
NLP
Algorithms
• Unstructured Information
Management Architecture (UIMA)
• C, C++, Java & Prolog
Artificial
Intelligence
• Raw unstructured data
• Machine Learning
• Pattern Recognition
* Image Courtesy Cray, Inc.
• Connects pairs of Compute Nodes
• Utilizes HyperTransport 3.0
Technology
• Eliminates PCI Bottlenecks
• Peak of 20GB/s bandwidth per node
• Provides 48 Port Router
• Provides 4 Lanes per Compute Node
with ECC
• Auto-detects errors in Lanes
• Utilizes Connectionless Protocol
o Scales from 100’s to 100,000’s of
compute nodes
o No increase in buffer
* Image Courtesy of Cray, Inc.
• Connected via 3D Torus Link
• Supports Millions of MPI
messages per Second
* Image Courtesy of Nersc
* Image Courtesy Cray, Inc.
Manages Gemini
Interconnects
Blade WarmSwap Capability
Hardware
Supervisory
System
Unhealthy Node
Removal
Automatic
System
Diagnostics
• Network Connectivity
• InfiniBand
• Fibre Channel
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• Ethernet
• Cooling Options
• Air-Cooled
• ECOphlex Liquid Cooling
• Disk Array Connectivity
• Fibre Channel
• SATA
• Power
• 45-54.1 kW per cabinet
• 3 Phase 100 Amp 480 Volt and 125 Amp 400 Volt
Compute Node Memory
• Quad Channel 16GB or 32GB DDR3 per Processor
• 6GB GDDR5 per GPU
System Cabinets
• Can support up to 96 Compute Nodes
• 3TB of Main Memory
• 576GB of GPU Memory
• Peak Performance of 70+ Teraflops
Complete System
• Scalable up to 500,000 Total Scalar Processing Cores
• Up to 50 Petaflops hybrid peak performance
Primary Uses
Massive
Parallelism
•
•
•
•
Weather Modeling
Fluid Dynamics
Medical & Genetics
Other
• Sequential Code vs. Parallel Code
• Follows Amdahl’s Law
Various
Architectures
• 1970’s – Multiple Vector Processors
• 1980’s – Many Single Core Processors
• 1990’s – Cluster, Many Multi-Core, Hybrid Systems
Today’s
Supercomputers
• Hybrid Architectures
• More Processing Cores
• Power Efficiency, Higher Performance, Lower Cost
Future Trends
• Exaflop Supercomputers?
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