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79-584: The United States once referred to the DF-ZF as the WU-14 . The DF-17 was previously referred to as the DF-ZF. According to Ye Youda, a scientist who worked on China's hypersonic weapon project, development was slowed by inadequate computing resources. The weapons project did not have priority access to supercomputers , or it was impractical to use available supercomputers due to their design. Seven flight tests — with one failure — were conducted from 2014 through 2016;

158-506: A massively parallel processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors , including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors . It was mainly used for rendering realistic 3D computer graphics . Fujitsu's VPP500 from 1992 is unusual since, to achieve higher speeds, its processors used GaAs , a material normally reserved for microwave applications due to its toxicity. Fujitsu 's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain

237-501: A plasma sheet will develop which disrupts their communications and sensors. There are two solutions to this. Firstly, HGVs can slow down to supersonic speeds, but this wouldn't make their terminal phase interception any harder than the missiles that current SAMs are designed to intercept. Secondly, HGVs can maintain hypersonic speeds and rely on inertial navigation systems , though this would mean that HGVs can't target maneuvering targets like expensive aircraft carriers , yet these are

316-417: A U.S. carrier strike group ." Hypersonic glide vehicles are less susceptible to anti-ballistic missile countermeasures than conventional reentry vehicles (RVs). Conventional RVs descend through the atmosphere on a predictable ballistic trajectory. In contrast, a hypersonic glide vehicle such as the DF-ZF can pull-up after reentering the atmosphere and approach its target in a relatively flat glide, lessening

395-586: A computer 100 times faster than any existing computer. The IBM 7030 used transistors , magnetic core memory, pipelined instructions, prefetched data through a memory controller and included pioneering random access disk drives. The IBM 7030 was completed in 1961 and despite not meeting the challenge of a hundredfold increase in performance, it was purchased by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Customers in England and France also bought

474-458: A general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS ) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 10  FLOPS, so called exascale supercomputers . For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10 ) to tens of teraFLOPS (10 ). Since November 2017, all of

553-457: A high performance I/O system to achieve high levels of performance. Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the TOP500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is a widely cited current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time. This is a list of the computers which appeared at

632-659: A larger system such as a full Linux distribution on server and I/O nodes. While in a traditional multi-user computer system job scheduling is, in effect, a tasking problem for processing and peripheral resources, in a massively parallel system, the job management system needs to manage the allocation of both computational and communication resources, as well as gracefully deal with inevitable hardware failures when tens of thousands of processors are present. Although most modern supercomputers use Linux -based operating systems, each manufacturer has its own specific Linux distribution, and no industry standard exists, partly due to

711-499: A lot of capacity but are not typically considered supercomputers, given that they do not solve a single very complex problem. In general, the speed of supercomputers is measured and benchmarked in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second), and not in terms of MIPS (million instructions per second), as is the case with general-purpose computers. These measurements are commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera- , combined into

790-629: A problem exacerbated by decreased detection times, the United States may place more importance on developing directed-energy weapons as a countermeasure. However, after decades of research and development , directed-energy weapons are still very much at the experimental stage and it remains to be seen if or when they will be deployed as practical, high-performance military weapons. Despite the difficulties that HGVs pose for mid-course ABM interception by systems like SM-3 and GBI , HGVs have yet to overcome substantial obstacles in order to achieve

869-472: A processing power of over 166 petaFLOPS through over 762 thousand active Computers (Hosts) on the network. As of October 2016 , Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search 's (GIMPS) distributed Mersenne Prime search achieved about 0.313 PFLOPS through over 1.3 million computers. The PrimeNet server has supported GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest volunteer computing projects, since 1997. Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing

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948-483: A single 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, e.g. a very complex weather simulation application. Capacity computing, in contrast, is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve a few somewhat large problems or many small problems. Architectures that lend themselves to supporting many users for routine everyday tasks may have

1027-419: Is " ultrasonic ", but the older meaning sometimes still lives on, as in the word superheterodyne The tip of a bullwhip is generally seen as the first object designed to reach the speed of sound. This action results in its telltale "crack", which is actually just a sonic boom . The first human-made supersonic boom was likely caused by a piece of common cloth, leading to the whip's eventual development. It's

1106-511: Is a bare-metal compute model to execute code, but each user is given virtualized login node. POD computing nodes are connected via non-virtualized 10 Gbit/s Ethernet or QDR InfiniBand networks. User connectivity to the POD data center ranges from 50 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. Citing Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, Penguin Computing argues that virtualization of compute nodes

1185-415: Is a form of distributed computing whereby the "super virtual computer" of many networked geographically disperse computers performs computing tasks that demand huge processing power. Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing aims to provide a higher quality of service than opportunistic grid computing by achieving more control over the assignment of tasks to distributed resources and the use of intelligence about

1264-466: Is an emerging direction, e.g. as in the Cyclops64 system. As the price, performance and energy efficiency of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have improved, a number of petaFLOPS supercomputers such as Tianhe-I and Nebulae have started to rely on them. However, other systems such as the K computer continue to use conventional processors such as SPARC -based designs and

1343-737: Is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04  megawatts (MW) of electricity. The cost to power and cool the system can be significant, e.g. 4 MW at $ 0.10/kWh is $ 400 an hour or about $ 3.5 million per year. Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices and affects powerful computer systems in various ways. The thermal design power and CPU power dissipation issues in supercomputing surpass those of traditional computer cooling technologies. The supercomputing awards for green computing reflect this issue. The packing of thousands of processors together inevitably generates significant amounts of heat density that need to be dealt with. The Cray-2

1422-428: Is crack formation faster than the speed of sound in a brittle material. The word supersonic comes from two Latin derived words ; 1) super : above and 2) sonus : sound, which together mean above sound, or faster than sound. At the beginning of the 20th century, the term "supersonic" was used as an adjective to describe sound whose frequency is above the range of normal human hearing. The modern term for this meaning

1501-444: Is more complex. The main key to having low supersonic drag is to properly shape the overall aircraft to be long and thin, and close to a "perfect" shape, the von Karman ogive or Sears-Haack body . This has led to almost every supersonic cruising aircraft looking very similar to every other, with a very long and slender fuselage and large delta wings, cf. SR-71 , Concorde , etc. Although not ideal for passenger aircraft, this shaping

1580-409: Is not suitable for HPC. Penguin Computing has also criticized that HPC clouds may have allocated computing nodes to customers that are far apart, causing latency that impairs performance for some HPC applications. Supercomputers generally aim for the maximum in capability computing rather than capacity computing. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve

1659-684: Is quite difficult to debug and test parallel programs. Special techniques need to be used for testing and debugging such applications. Opportunistic supercomputing is a form of networked grid computing whereby a "super virtual computer" of many loosely coupled volunteer computing machines performs very large computing tasks. Grid computing has been applied to a number of large-scale embarrassingly parallel problems that require supercomputing performance scales. However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing cannot handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations. The fastest grid computing system

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1738-428: Is the volunteer computing project Folding@home (F@h). As of April 2020 , F@h reported 2.5 exaFLOPS of x86 processing power. Of this, over 100 PFLOPS are contributed by clients running on various GPUs, and the rest from various CPU systems. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform hosts a number of volunteer computing projects. As of February 2017 , BOINC recorded

1817-442: Is the highly successful Cray-1 of 1976. Vector computers remained the dominant design into the 1990s. From then until today, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors became the norm. The US has long been the leader in the supercomputer field, first through Cray's almost uninterrupted dominance of the field, and later through a variety of technology companies. Japan made major strides in

1896-556: The Blue Gene system, IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density. The IBM Power 775 , released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling. The IBM Aquasar system uses hot water cooling to achieve energy efficiency, the water being used to heat buildings as well. The energy efficiency of computer systems is generally measured in terms of " FLOPS per watt ". In 2008, Roadrunner by IBM operated at 376  MFLOPS/W . In November 2010,

1975-760: The Blue Gene/Q reached 1,684 MFLOPS/W and in June 2011 the top two spots on the Green 500 list were occupied by Blue Gene machines in New York (one achieving 2097 MFLOPS/W) with the DEGIMA cluster in Nagasaki placing third with 1375 MFLOPS/W. Because copper wires can transfer energy into a supercomputer with much higher power densities than forced air or circulating refrigerants can remove waste heat ,

2054-545: The COVID-19 pandemic and the vehicle was put up for sale. Most modern fighter aircraft are supersonic aircraft. No modern-day passenger aircraft are capable of supersonic speed, but there have been supersonic passenger aircraft , namely Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144 . Both of these passenger aircraft and some modern fighters are also capable of supercruise , a condition of sustained supersonic flight without

2133-541: The Connection Machine (CM) that developed from research at MIT . The CM-1 used as many as 65,536 simplified custom microprocessors connected together in a network to share data. Several updated versions followed; the CM-5 supercomputer is a massively parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second. In 1982, Osaka University 's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used

2212-613: The DES cipher . Throughout the decades, the management of heat density has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers. The large amount of heat generated by a system may also have other effects, e.g. reducing the lifetime of other system components. There have been diverse approaches to heat management, from pumping Fluorinert through the system, to a hybrid liquid-air cooling system or air cooling with normal air conditioning temperatures. A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which

2291-465: The Goodyear MPP . But by the mid-1990s, general-purpose CPU performance had improved so much in that a supercomputer could be built using them as the individual processing units, instead of using custom chips. By the turn of the 21st century, designs featuring tens of thousands of commodity CPUs were the norm, with later machines adding graphic units to the mix. In 1998, David Bader developed

2370-702: The Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC), today considered among the first supercomputers, for the US Navy Research and Development Center. It still used high-speed drum memory , rather than the newly emerging disk drive technology. Also, among the first supercomputers was the IBM 7030 Stretch . The IBM 7030 was built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory , which then in 1955 had requested

2449-594: The ThrustSSC . The vehicle, driven by Andy Green , holds the world land speed record, having achieved an average speed on its bi-directional run of 1,228 km/h (763 mph) in the Black Rock Desert on 15 October 1997. The Bloodhound LSR project planned an attempt on the record in 2020 at Hakskeenpan in South Africa with a combination jet and hybrid rocket propelled car. The aim was to break

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2528-562: The Tupolev Tu-160 and Rockwell B-1 Lancer are also supersonic-capable. The aerodynamics of supersonic aircraft is simpler than subsonic aerodynamics because the airsheets at different points along the plane often cannot affect each other. Supersonic jets and rocket vehicles require several times greater thrust to push through the extra aerodynamic drag experienced within the transonic region (around Mach 0.85–1.2). At these speeds aerospace engineers can gently guide air around

2607-524: The fuselage of the aircraft without producing new shock waves , but any change in cross area farther down the vehicle leads to shock waves along the body. Designers use the Supersonic area rule and the Whitcomb area rule to minimize sudden changes in size. However, in practical applications, a supersonic aircraft must operate stably in both subsonic and supersonic profiles, hence aerodynamic design

2686-626: The grid computing approach, the processing power of many computers, organized as distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available. In another approach, many processors are used in 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

2765-471: The molecular mass and temperature of the gas, and pressure has little effect. Since air temperature and composition varies significantly with altitude, the speed of sound, and Mach numbers for a steadily moving object may change. In water at room temperature supersonic speed means any speed greater than 1,440 m/s (4,724 ft/s). In solids, sound waves can be polarized longitudinally or transversely and have higher velocities. Supersonic fracture

2844-420: The speed of sound ( Mach  1). For objects traveling in dry air of a temperature of 20 °C (68 °F) at sea level , this speed is approximately 343.2 m/s (1,126 ft/s; 768 mph; 667.1 kn; 1,236 km/h). Speeds greater than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) are often referred to as hypersonic . Flights during which only some parts of the air surrounding an object, such as

2923-467: The speed of sound decreases somewhat with altitude, due to lower temperatures found there (typically up to 25 km). At even higher altitudes the temperature starts increasing, with the corresponding increase in the speed of sound. When an inflated balloon is burst, the torn pieces of latex contract at supersonic speed, which contributes to the sharp and loud popping noise. To date, only one land vehicle has officially travelled at supersonic speed,

3002-519: The thermal design power of the supercomputer as a whole, the amount that the power and cooling infrastructure can handle, is somewhat more than the expected normal power consumption, but less than the theoretical peak power consumption of the electronic hardware. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, based on the changes in supercomputer architecture . While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed,

3081-546: The wave motion travelling through the bullwhip that makes it capable of achieving supersonic speeds. Most modern firearm bullets are supersonic, with rifle projectiles often travelling at speeds approaching and in some cases well exceeding Mach 3 . Most spacecraft are supersonic at least during portions of their reentry, though the effects on the spacecraft are reduced by low air densities. During ascent, launch vehicles generally avoid going supersonic below 30 km (~98,400 feet) to reduce air drag. Note that

3160-635: The world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux -based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science , and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics , weather forecasting , climate research , oil and gas exploration , molecular modeling (computing

3239-501: The 1970s was the ILLIAC IV . This machine was the first realized example of a true massively parallel computer, in which many processors worked together to solve different parts of a single larger problem. In contrast with the vector systems, which were designed to run a single stream of data as quickly as possible, in this concept, the computer instead feeds separate parts of the data to entirely different processors and then recombines

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3318-495: The CDC6600 became the fastest computer in the world. Given that the 6600 outperformed all the other contemporary computers 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, Cray Research . Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, which became one of

3397-417: The DF-ZF will first be used in shorter-range roles as an anti-ship missile and for other tactical purposes to address the problem of hitting a moving target with a ballistic missile. Long-term goals may include deterrence of U.S. missile capabilities. Since conventional interceptor missiles have difficulty against maneuvering targets traveling faster than Mach 5 (the DF-ZF reenters the atmosphere at Mach 10),

3476-696: The Mach 17 Russian 53T6, ABM-3 Gazelle . Other potential counter-hypersonic interception measures may involve laser or railgun technologies, but such technologies are not currently available. A vehicle like the DF-ZF could be fitted to various Chinese ballistic missiles, such as the DF-21 medium-range missile (extending range from 2,000 to 3,000 km (1,200 to 1,900 mi)), and the DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missiles (extending range from 8,000 to 12,000 km (5,000 to 7,500 mi)). Analysts suspect that

3555-650: The National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) to ensure interoperability, as none of it had been run on Linux previously. Using the successful prototype design, he led the development of "RoadRunner," the first Linux supercomputer for open use by the national science and engineering community via the National Science Foundation's National Technology Grid. RoadRunner was put into production use in April 1999. At

3634-454: The ability of the cooling systems to remove waste heat is a limiting factor. As of 2015 , many existing supercomputers have more infrastructure capacity than the actual peak demand of the machine – designers generally conservatively design the power and cooling infrastructure to handle more than the theoretical peak electrical power consumed by the supercomputer. Designs for future supercomputers are power-limited –

3713-546: The achievable throughput, derived from the LINPACK benchmarks and shown as "Rmax" in the TOP500 list. The LINPACK benchmark typically performs LU decomposition of a large matrix. The LINPACK performance gives some indication of performance for some real-world problems, but does not necessarily match the processing requirements of many other supercomputer workloads, which for example may require more memory bandwidth, or may require better integer computing performance, or may need

3792-507: The actual core memory of the Atlas was only 16,000 words, with a drum providing memory for a further 96,000 words. The Atlas Supervisor swapped data in the form of pages between the magnetic core and the drum. The Atlas operating system also introduced time-sharing to supercomputing, so that more than one program could be executed on the supercomputer at any one time. Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and Manchester University and

3871-424: The attention of high-performance computing (HPC) users and developers in recent years. Cloud computing attempts to provide HPC-as-a-service exactly like other forms of services available in the cloud such as software as a service , platform as a service , and infrastructure as a service . HPC users may benefit from the cloud in different angles such as scalability, resources being on-demand, fast, and inexpensive. On

3950-505: The availability and reliability of individual systems within the supercomputing network. However, quasi-opportunistic distributed execution of demanding parallel computing software in grids should be achieved through the implementation of grid-wise allocation agreements, co-allocation subsystems, communication topology-aware allocation mechanisms, fault tolerant message passing libraries and data pre-conditioning. Cloud computing with its recent and rapid expansions and development have grabbed

4029-520: The computer, and it became the basis for the IBM 7950 Harvest , a supercomputer built for cryptanalysis . The third pioneering supercomputer project in the early 1960s was the Atlas at the University of Manchester , built by a team led by Tom Kilburn . He designed the Atlas to have memory space for up to a million words of 48 bits, but because magnetic storage with such a capacity was unaffordable,

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4108-435: The ends of rotor blades, reach supersonic speeds are called transonic . This occurs typically somewhere between Mach 0.8 and Mach 1.2. Sounds are traveling vibrations in the form of pressure waves in an elastic medium. Objects move at supersonic speed when the objects move faster than the speed at which sound propagates through the medium. In gases, sound travels longitudinally at different speeds, mostly depending on

4187-426: The exact targets that are valuable enough for HGVs with costs in the tens of millions each, to be worth targeting. These factors have likely contributed to DF-ZF currently being used for a land-attack role only, although an anti-ship variant is in development. Supercomputer This is an accepted version of this page A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to

4266-460: The existing record, then make further attempts during which (the members of) the team hoped to reach speeds of up to 1,600 km/h (1,000 mph). The effort was originally run by Richard Noble who was the leader of the ThrustSSC project, however following funding issues in 2018, the team was bought by Ian Warhurst and renamed Bloodhound LSR. Later the project was indefinitely delayed due to

4345-408: The fact that the differences in hardware architectures require changes to optimize the operating system to each hardware design. The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM , VTL , and open source software such as Beowulf . In

4424-496: The fastest was made by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. The first such machines were highly tuned conventional designs that ran more quickly than their more general-purpose contemporaries. Through the decade, increasing amounts of parallelism were added, with one to four processors being typical. In the 1970s, vector processors operating on large arrays of data came to dominate. A notable example

4503-413: The field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in the field. As of November 2024 , Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan is the world's fastest supercomputer. The US has five of the top 10; Japan, Finland, Switzerland, Italy and Spain have one each. In June 2018, all combined supercomputers on the TOP500 list broke the 1 exaFLOPS mark. In 1960, UNIVAC built

4582-569: The first Linux supercomputer using commodity parts. While at the University of New Mexico, Bader sought to build a supercomputer running Linux using consumer off-the-shelf parts and a high-speed low-latency interconnection network. The prototype utilized an Alta Technologies "AltaCluster" of eight dual, 333 MHz, Intel Pentium II computers running a modified Linux kernel. Bader ported a significant amount of software to provide Linux support for necessary components as well as code from members of

4661-875: The launches were from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi Province , the People's Liberation Army 's main long-range missile testing center. The DF-ZF was likely operational by 1 October 2019, when it made its first official public appearance. The DF-ZF is thought to reach speeds between Mach 5 (3,836 mph (6,173 km/h; 1,715 m/s)) and Mach 10 (7,680 mph (12,360 km/h; 3,430 m/s)). The glider could be used for nuclear weapons delivery but could also be used to perform precision-strike conventional missions (for example, next-generation anti-ship ballistic missiles ), which could penetrate "the layered air defenses of

4740-560: The most common scenario, environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are used. Significant effort is required to optimize an algorithm for the interconnect characteristics of the machine it will be run on; the aim is to prevent any of the CPUs from wasting time waiting on data from other nodes. GPGPUs have hundreds of processor cores and are programmed using programming models such as CUDA or OpenCL . Moreover, it

4819-472: The most successful supercomputers in history. The Cray-2 was released in 1985. It had eight central processing units (CPUs), liquid cooling and the electronics coolant liquid Fluorinert was pumped through the supercomputer architecture . It reached 1.9  gigaFLOPS , making it the first supercomputer to break the gigaflop barrier. The only computer to seriously challenge the Cray-1's performance in

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4898-612: The other hand, moving HPC applications have a set of challenges too. Good examples of such challenges are virtualization overhead in the cloud, multi-tenancy of resources, and network latency issues. Much research is currently being done to overcome these challenges and make HPC in the cloud a more realistic possibility. In 2016, Penguin Computing, Parallel Works, R-HPC, Amazon Web Services , Univa , Silicon Graphics International , Rescale , Sabalcore, and Gomput started to offer HPC cloud computing . The Penguin On Demand (POD) cloud

4977-457: The overall applicability of GPGPUs in general-purpose high-performance computing applications has been the subject of debate, in that while a GPGPU may be tuned to score well on specific benchmarks, its overall applicability to everyday algorithms may be limited unless significant effort is spent to tune the application to it. However, GPUs are gaining ground, and in 2012 the Jaguar supercomputer

5056-511: The overall performance of a computer system, yet the goal of the Linpack benchmark is to approximate how fast the computer solves numerical problems and it is widely used in the industry. The FLOPS measurement is either quoted based on the theoretical floating point performance of a processor (derived from manufacturer's processor specifications and shown as "Rpeak" in the TOP500 lists), which is generally unachievable when running real workloads, or

5135-464: The results. The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray-1's peak of 250 MFLOPS. However, development problems led to only 64 processors being built, and the system could never operate more quickly than about 200 MFLOPS while being much larger and more complex than the Cray. Another problem was that writing software for

5214-424: The same success in the terminal phase. For one thing, HGVs can only maneuver drastically in the mid-course phase of their flight path due to extreme pressures during their terminal phase. Additionally, contemporary SAM systems like THAAD , PATRIOT and SM-6 are mostly optimized for terminal phase interception, with the exception of SM-3 and GBI. Furthermore, when HGVs re-enter the atmosphere at hypersonic velocities

5293-605: The shorthand TFLOPS (10 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops ), or peta- , combined into the shorthand PFLOPS (10 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops .) Petascale supercomputers can process one quadrillion (10 ) (1000 trillion) FLOPS. Exascale is computing performance in the exaFLOPS (EFLOPS) range. An EFLOPS is one quintillion (10 ) FLOPS (one million TFLOPS). However, The performance of a supercomputer can be severely impacted by fluctuation brought on by elements like system load, network traffic, and concurrent processes, as mentioned by Brehm and Bruhwiler (2015). No single number can reflect

5372-420: The structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules , polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics , the detonation of nuclear weapons , and nuclear fusion ). They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis . Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades

5451-515: The system was difficult, and getting peak performance from it was a matter of serious effort. But the partial success of the ILLIAC IV was widely seen as pointing the way to the future of supercomputing. Cray argued against this, famously quipping that "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" But by the early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably

5530-453: The time it can be detected, fired at, or reengaged if an initial attack fails. Gliding makes it more maneuverable and extends its range. Although gliding creates more drag, it flies further than it would on a higher trajectory through space, and is too low to be intercepted by exo-atmospheric kill vehicles. The tradeoff is that warheads have less speed and altitude as they near the target, making them vulnerable to lower-tier interceptors, such as

5609-444: The time of its deployment, it was considered one of the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world. Though Linux-based clusters using consumer-grade parts, such as Beowulf , existed prior to the development of Bader's prototype and RoadRunner, they lacked the scalability, bandwidth, and parallel computing capabilities to be considered "true" supercomputers. Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths. In

5688-454: The top of the TOP500 list since June 1993, and the "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. In 2018, Lenovo became the world's largest provider for the TOP500 supercomputers with 117 units produced. Rpeak country system 1,685.65 (9,248 × 64-core Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C @2.0 GHz) Supersonic speed Supersonic speed is the speed of an object that exceeds

5767-406: The top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7  gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a 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

5846-422: The trend has been to move away from in-house operating systems to the adaptation of generic software such as Linux . Since modern massively parallel supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes , they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g. using a small and efficient lightweight kernel such as CNK or CNL on compute nodes, but

5925-405: The use of an afterburner . Due to its ability to supercruise for several hours and the relatively high frequency of flight over several decades, Concorde spent more time flying supersonically than all other aircraft combined by a considerable margin. Since Concorde's final retirement flight on November 26, 2003, there are no supersonic passenger aircraft left in service. Some large bombers , such as

6004-511: Was liquid cooled , and used a Fluorinert "cooling waterfall" which was forced through the modules under pressure. However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company . In

6083-624: 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 . Software development remained a problem, but the CM series sparked off considerable research into this issue. Similar designs using custom hardware were made by many companies, including the Evans & Sutherland ES-1 , MasPar , nCUBE , Intel iPSC and

6162-426: Was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. The CDC 6600 , designed by Seymour Cray , was finished in 1964 and marked the transition from germanium to silicon transistors. Silicon transistors could run more quickly and the overheating problem was solved by introducing refrigeration to the supercomputer design. Thus,

6241-771: Was transformed into Titan by retrofitting CPUs with GPUs. High-performance computers have an expected life cycle of about three years before requiring an upgrade. The Gyoukou supercomputer is unique in that it uses both a massively parallel design and liquid immersion cooling . A number of special-purpose systems have been designed, dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom ASICs , allowing better price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. Examples of special-purpose supercomputers include Belle , Deep Blue , and Hydra for playing chess , Gravity Pipe for astrophysics, MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure prediction and molecular dynamics, and Deep Crack for breaking

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