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129-510: The Atlas was one of the world's first supercomputers , in use from 1962 (when it was claimed to be the most powerful computer in the world) to 1972. Atlas's capacity promoted the saying that when it went offline, half of the United Kingdom's computer capacity was lost. It is notable for being the first machine with virtual memory (at that time referred to as "one-level store") using paging techniques; this approach quickly spread, and
258-660: A Sony/ATV consortium for around $ 2.2 billion. Other members of the Sony consortium include the estate of Michael Jackson , the Blackstone Group , and the Abu Dhabi –owned Mubadala Development Company . EMI's locations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were all disassembled to repay debt, but the primary head office located outside those countries is still functional. EMI Music Publishing
387-514: A card reader , for instance, will spend the vast majority of its time waiting for the reader to send in the next bit of data. To support these devices while still making efficient use of the central processing unit (CPU), the new system would need to have additional memory to buffer data and have an operating system that could coordinate the flow of data around the system. When the Brunt Committee heard of new and much faster US designs,
516-578: A context switch from user mode to extracode mode or executive mode, or from extracode mode to executive mode, was therefore very fast. Supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to 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,
645-506: 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
774-696: A computer conference that "there is in this country a range of medium-speed computers, and the only two machines which are really fast are the Cambridge EDSAC 2 and the Manchester Mark 2, although both are still very slow compared with the fastest American machines." This was followed by similar concerns expressed in May report to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research Advisory Committee on High Speed Calculating Machines, better known as
903-454: A deal licensing EMI's catalogue in a digital format for their online streaming music service. This was the first time EMI had licensed any of its catalogue to a streaming music website. Pop star Robbie Williams signed a six-album deal in 2002 paying him over £80 million ($ 157 million), which was not only the biggest recording contract in British music history at the time, but also
1032-517: A desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10 ) to tens of teraFLOPS (10 ). Since November 2017, all of 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
1161-522: A grant of £300,000 from the NRDC to build the system, which would be returned from the proceeds of sales. At some point during this process, the machine was renamed Atlas. The detailed design was completed by the end of 1959, and the construction of the compilers was proceeding. However, the Supervisor operating system was already well behind. This led to David Howarth, newly hired at Ferranti, expanding
1290-457: 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
1419-659: 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
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#17327756530691548-717: A loss of £260 million in 2006/2007, in August 2007 EMI was acquired by Terra Firma Capital Partners for £4.2 billion. Following the transition, several artists including Radiohead left EMI, while other artists such as Paul McCartney had left ahead of the takeover. At the same time, the Rolling Stones signed a one-album deal with Interscope Records / Universal Music Group outside its contract with EMI, which expired in February 2008, and then in July 2008 signed
1677-499: 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
1806-442: A new long-term deal with Universal Music Group . The Terra Firma takeover was also reported to have been the catalyst behind a lawsuit filed by Pink Floyd over unpaid royalties. In January 2011 Pink Floyd signed a new global agreement with EMI. Around the same time, Guy Hands , CEO of Terra Firma Capital Partners, came to EMI with restructuring plans to cut between 1,500 and 2,000 jobs and to reduce costs by £200 million
1935-472: 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
2064-477: A punitive harassment meant to scare other musicians. The band's troubles with the label resonate through their third studio album This Is War (2009) and were the subject of the 2012 documentary Artifact . In 2008, EMI withdrew from the South-East Asian market entirely, forcing its large roster of acts to search out contracts with other unaffiliated labels. As a result, the South-East Asian market
2193-508: A response to the US LARC and STRETCH programs. Both ultimately beat Atlas into official use, LARC in 1961, and STRETCH a few months before Atlas. Atlas was much faster than LARC, about four times, and ran slightly slower than STRETCH - Atlas added two floating-point numbers in about 1.59 microseconds, while STRETCH did the same in 1.38 to 1.5 microseconds. Nevertheless, the head of Ferranti's Software Division, Hugh Devonald, said in 1962: "Atlas
2322-483: 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
2451-666: A symbolic input language close to machine language). Being a university computer it was patronised by a large number of the student population, who had access to a protected machine code development environment. Several of the compilers were written using the Brooker Morris Compiler Compiler (BMCC) , considered to be the first of its type. It also had a programming language called SPG (System Program Generator). At run time an SPG program could compile more program for itself. It could define and use macros . Its variables were in <angle brackets> and it had
2580-572: 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, 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
2709-400: A text parser, giving SPG program text a resemblance to Backus–Naur form . From the outset, Atlas was conceived as a supercomputer that would include a comprehensive operating system. The hardware included specific features that facilitated the work of the operating system. For example, the extracode routines and the interrupt routines each had dedicated storage, registers and program counters;
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#17327756530692838-537: A year. As a result, the UK chief executive Tony Wadsworth left EMI after 25 years in January 2008. The cuts were planned to take effect over the year 2008, and would affect up to a third of EMI's 5,500 staff. Thirty Seconds to Mars tried to exit their contract with EMI following the layoff of its staff and due to unpaid royalties, prompting the label to file a lawsuit for $ 30 million citing breach of contract. The suit
2967-511: 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
3096-415: 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
3225-466: 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
3354-737: 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
3483-401: Is in fact claimed to be the world's most powerful computing system. By such a claim it is meant that, if Atlas and any of its rivals were presented simultaneously with similar large sets of representative computing jobs, Atlas should complete its set ahead of all other computers.". No further sales of LARC were attempted, and it is not clear how many STRETCH machines were ultimately produced. It
3612-409: 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
3741-534: Is now operated exclusively throughout the world by Sony Music Entertainment; except in Japan where the trade mark is owned by Columbia Music Entertainment . EMI released its first LPs in 1952 and its first stereophonic recordings in 1955 (first on reel-to-reel tape and then LPs, beginning in 1958). In 1957, to replace the loss of its long-established licensing arrangements with RCA Victor and Columbia Records (Columbia USA cut its ties with EMI in 1951), EMI entered
3870-1109: Is now owned by Sony Music Publishing , the music publishing division of Sony Music which bought another 70% stake in EMI Music Publishing. Electric and Musical Industries Ltd was formed in March 1931 by the merger of the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company , with its " His Master's Voice " record label, firms that have a history extending back to the origins of recorded sound . The new vertically integrated company produced sound recordings as well as recording and playback equipment. The company's gramophone manufacturing led to 40 years of success with larger-scale electronics and electrical engineering . In October 1979, EMI merged with Thorn Electrical Industries to create Thorn EMI . On 16 August 1996, Thorn EMI shareholders voted in favour of demerging Thorn from EMI again:
3999-554: Is now ubiquitous. Atlas was a second-generation computer , using discrete germanium transistors . Atlas was created in a joint development effort among the University of Manchester , Ferranti and Plessey . Two other Atlas machines were built: one for BP and the University of London , and one for the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton near Oxford . A derivative system was built by Ferranti for
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4128-684: 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
4257-428: 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
4386-549: The BBC 's second television transmitter at Sutton Coldfield. It also manufactured broadcast television cameras for British television production companies as well as for the BBC. The commercial television ITV companies also used them alongside cameras made by Pye and Marconi . Their best-remembered piece of broadcast television equipment was the EMI 2001 colour television camera, which became
4515-556: 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,
4644-760: 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 ,
4773-551: The Choir of King's College, Cambridge . During the era of the long-playing record (LP), very few American and Canadian orchestras had their principal recording contracts with EMI, one notable exception being that of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra , especially during the tenure of William Steinberg . From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the company enjoyed huge success in the popular music field under
4902-613: 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
5031-805: The EMI Laboratories in Hayes, Hillingdon developed radar equipment (including the receiver section of the British Army's GL-II anti-aircraft fire-control radar), microwave devices such as the reflex klystron oscillator (having played a crucial role in the development of early production types following on from the British Admiralty Signal School's pioneering NR89, the so-called "Sutton tube"), electro-optic devices such as infra-red image converters, and eventually guided missiles employing analogue computers. The company
5160-465: 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
5289-630: The OKeh label. RCA sold its stake in EMI in 1935, but due to its 1929 takeover of Victor, RCA retained the North and South American rights to the " His Master's Voice " trademark. In other countries, the Nipper logo was used by the EMI subsidiary label HMV, even though the "His Master's Voice" slogan itself would be retained by RCA along with the logo. In 1938 ARC-Brunswick was taken over by CBS , which then sold
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5418-680: The Univac LARC and IBM STRETCH , they were able to gain the attention of the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), responsible for moving technologies from war-era research groups into the market. Over the next eighteen months, they held numerous meetings with prospective customers, engineering teams at Ferranti and EMI , and design teams at Manchester and the Royal Radar Establishment . In spite of all this effort, by
5547-694: The University of Cambridge . Called the Titan , or Atlas 2, it had a different memory organisation and ran a time-sharing operating system developed by Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. Two further Atlas 2s were delivered: one to the CAD Centre in Cambridge (later called CADCentre, then AVEVA ), and the other to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE), Aldermaston. The University of Manchester's Atlas
5676-626: 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
5805-664: The most significant bit was set to zero, this was an ordinary machine instruction executed directly by the hardware. If the uppermost bit was set to one, this was an Extracode and was implemented as a special kind of subroutine jump to a location in the fixed store ( ROM ), its address being determined by the other nine bits. About 250 extracodes were implemented, of the 512 possible. Extracodes were what would be called software interrupts or traps today. They were used to call mathematical procedures which would have been too inefficient to implement in hardware , for example sine , logarithm , and square root . But about half of
5934-519: 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,
6063-445: The 80 MHz Cray-1 in 1976, which became one of 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
6192-547: The American Brunswick label to American Decca Records , which along with its other properties, Vocalion Records and Aeolian Vocalion Records, used it as a subsidiary budget label afterward. CBS then operated Columbia as its flagship label in both the United States and Canada. EMI retained the rights to the Columbia name in most other territories including the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It continued to operate
6321-589: The American market by acquiring 96% of the stock for Capitol Records USA. From 1960 to 1995 their "EMI House" corporate headquarters was located at 20 Manchester Square London, England, the stairwell from which was featured on the cover of the Beatles' Please Please Me album. In addition, an unused shot from the Please Please Me photo session, featuring the boys in short hair and cleancut attire,
6450-553: The Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton, a few yards outside the boundary fence of Harwell, which placed it on civilian lands and thus made it much easier to access. This installation grew to be the largest Atlas, containing 48 kWords of 48-bit core memory and 32 tape drives. Time was made available to all UK universities. It was shut down in March 1974. In February 1962, Ferranti gave some parts of an Atlas machine to University of Cambridge , and in return,
6579-455: The Atlas was "Extracode", a technique that allowed complex instructions to be implemented in software. Dedicated hardware expedited entry to and return from the extracode routine and operand access; also, the code of the extracode routines was stored in ROM, which could be accessed faster than the core store. The uppermost ten bits of a 48-bit Atlas machine instruction were the operation code . If
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#17327756530696708-667: The Beatles into the EMI fold. When the Gramophone Company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company (including Columbia's subsidiary label Parlophone ) in 1931, the new Anglo-American group was incorporated as Electric & Musical Industries Limited. At this point, the Radio Corporation of America had a majority shareholding in the new company due to RCA purchasing the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929. Victor owned 50% of
6837-516: The British affiliated Gramophone Company, giving RCA chairman David Sarnoff a seat on the EMI board. However, EMI was subsequently forced to sell Columbia USA due to anti-trust action taken by its American competitors. By this time the record industry had been hit hard by the Depression and in 1934 a much-diminished Columbia USA was purchased for just US$ 70,500 by ARC-BRC ( American Record Corporation –Brunswick Record Company), which also acquired
6966-421: The Brunt Committee. Through this period, Tom Kilburn 's team at the University of Manchester had been experimenting with transistor -based systems, building two small machines to test various techniques. This was clearly the way forward, and in the autumn of 1956, Kilburn began canvassing possible customers on what features they would want in a new transistor-based machine. Most commercial customers pointed out
7095-601: The Christian music market by acquiring Sparrow Records . Due to the increasing divergence of business models, Thorn EMI shareholders voted in favour of demerger proposals on 16 August 1996. The resulting media company was now known as EMI Group PLC. In 1997, EMI Records USA was folded into both Virgin and Capitol. Since the 1930s, the Pathé Records label headquartered in Shanghai , China had been published under
7224-520: The Cray-1's performance in 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
7353-520: The Cray. Another problem was that writing software for 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
7482-518: The EMI banner and since then, EMI had also been the dominant label in the cantopop market throughout Greater China until the genre's decline in the mid-1980s. Between the years 2004–2006, EMI then completely and totally divested itself from the c-pop market, and after that, all Hong Kong music artists previously associated with EMI had their music published by Gold Label , a concern unaffiliated with EMI and with which EMI did not yet hold any interest. On 21 November 2000, Streamwaves and EMI signed
7611-563: The EMI imprint. On 1 July 1973 the Gramophone Company subsidiary (The Gramophone Co. Ltd.) was renamed EMI Records Ltd as well, and in 1978, EMI launched EMI America Records as its second label in the United States after Capitol. EMI Music Worldwide was also formed in 1978 with Bhaskar Menon as chairman and CEO. In February 1979, EMI Ltd acquired United Artists Records and with it their subsidiary labels Liberty Records and Imperial Records . Eight months later, Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI Ltd. to form Thorn EMI . Sometime in
7740-519: The Japanese EMI branch, remains unchanged from the reflection of Toshiba 's divestiture to the business by EMI buying the whole branch way back July 2007, making it a full subsidiary. In July 2009, there were reports that EMI would not sell CDs to independent album retailers in a bid to cut costs, but in fact only a handful of small physical retailers were affected. In February 2010, EMI Group reported pre-tax losses of £1.75 billion for
7869-473: The Manchester Atlas was exemplary, not because it was a large machine that we would build, but because it illustrated a number of good design principles. Atlas was multiprogrammed with a well defined interface between the user and operating system, had a very large address space, and introduced the notion of extra codes to extend the functionality of its instruction set. In June 2022 an IEEE Milestone
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#17327756530697998-630: The Middle East and Africa as well as in Canada , Russia , India , China , Japan , Australia and New Zealand . Gramophone's (later EMI's) Australian and New Zealand subsidiaries dominated the popular music industries in those countries across the Asia-Pacific region from the 1920s until the 1960s, when other locally owned labels (such as Festival Records ) began to challenge the near monopoly of EMI. Over 150,000 78-rpm recordings from around
8127-650: 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
8256-562: The UK's first commercially available all- transistor computer, was developed at EMI's Central Research Laboratories in Hayes under the leadership of Godfrey Hounsfield , an electrical engineer at EMI. In the early 1970s, with financial support by the UK Department of Health and Social Security as well as EMI research investment, Hounsfield developed the first CT scanner , a device which revolutionised medical imaging . In 1973 EMI
8385-510: The University would use these to develop a cheaper version of the system. The result was the Titan machine, which became operational in the summer of 1963. Ferranti sold two more of this design under the name Atlas 2, one to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (Aldermaston) in 1963, and another to the government-sponsored Computer Aided Design Center in 1966. Atlas had been designed as
8514-454: 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 –
8643-546: 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
8772-424: 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
8901-505: 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
9030-481: The codes were designated as Supervisor functions, which invoked operating system procedures. Typical examples would be "Print the specified character on the specified stream" or "Read a block of 512 words from logical tape N". Extracodes were the only means by which a program could communicate with the Supervisor. Other UK machines of the era, such as the Ferranti Orion , had similar mechanisms for calling on
9159-548: The company became EMI Group plc, and the electronics and rentals divisions were divested as Thorn plc . The company broke up in 2012. In 1934, an EMI research team led by Sir Isaac Shoenberg developed the electronic Marconi-EMI system for television broadcasting, which quickly replaced Baird's electro-mechanical system following its introduction in 1936. After the Second World War , EMI resumed its involvement in making broadcasting equipment, notably providing
9288-419: The data to entirely different processors and then recombines 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
9417-430: 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 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
9546-643: The early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably 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
9675-552: 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 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
9804-668: The exception of Parlophone, as it is now owned by Warner Music . EMI was listed on the London Stock Exchange , and was also once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index , but faced financial problems and US$ 4 billion in debt, leading to its acquisition by Citigroup in February 2011. Citigroup's ownership was temporary, as EMI announced in November 2011 that it would sell its music arm to Vivendi 's Universal Music Group for $ 1.9 billion and its publishing business to
9933-408: 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
10062-410: 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 the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules , polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of
10191-510: 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
10320-534: 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 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
10449-725: The iTunes Plus category). Tracks were to cost $ 1.29/€1.29/£0.99. Legacy tracks with FairPlay DRM would still be available for $ 0.99/€0.99/£0.79 – albeit with lower quality sound and DRM restrictions still in place. Users would be able to 'upgrade' the EMI tracks that they had already bought for $ 0.30/€0.30/£0.20. Albums were also to be available at the same price as their lower quality, DRM counterparts and music videos from EMI would also be DRM-free. The higher-quality, DRM-free files became available worldwide on iTunes on 30 May 2007, and were expected to appear on other music download services soon thereafter. Following this decision, Universal Music Group also announced sales of DRM-free music (which
10578-596: The label with moderate success until 1973, when it was retired and replaced by the EMI Records imprint, making records with the Columbia Records label manufactured outside North America between 1972 and 1992 rare. In 1990, following a series of major takeovers that saw CBS Records acquired by the Sony Corporation of Japan, EMI sold its remaining rights to the Columbia name to Sony and the label
10707-523: The label, but that these audits rarely result in legal action. A legal settlement was announced on 12 April 2007 and terms were undisclosed. On 2 April 2007, EMI announced it would be releasing its music in DRM -free formats. These were to be issued in AAC format, which gave higher quality for the same bitrate compared with the ubiquitous MP3 format. The music would be distributed via Apple's iTunes Store (under
10836-628: The late 1980s, EMI America merged with sister label Manhattan Records , founded in 1984, becoming EMI Manhattan and eventually EMI USA when Capitol absorbed it in 1989. Also in 1989, Thorn EMI bought a 50% interest in Chrysalis Records , completing the buyout two years later. Six months after completing the buyout of Chrysalis, Thorn EMI bought Virgin Records from Richard Branson in one of its highest-profile and most expensive acquisitions in record music history. In 1992, Thorn EMI entered
10965-431: The mainstay of much of the British television industry from the end of the 1960s until the early 1990s. Exports of this piece of equipment were low, however, and EMI left this area of product manufacture. EMI engineer Alan Blumlein received a patent for the invention of stereophonic sound in 1931. He was killed in 1942 whilst conducting flight trials on an experimental H2S radar set. During and after World War II ,
11094-601: The management of Sir Joseph Lockwood . The strong combination of EMI and its subsidiary labels (including Parlophone , HMV , Columbia and Capitol Records ) along with a roster of stellar groups such as the Hollies , the Shadows , the Beach Boys and the Beatles along with hit solo performers such as Frank Sinatra , Cliff Richard , and Nat 'King' Cole , made EMI the best-known and most successful recording company in
11223-560: 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
11352-508: The need to support a wide variety of peripheral devices, while the Atomic Energy Authority suggested a machine able to perform an instruction every microsecond, or as it would be known today, 1 MIPS of performance. This later request led to the name of the prospective design, MUSE, for microsecond engine. The need to support many peripherals and the need to run fast are naturally at odds. A program that processes data from
11481-441: 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 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
11610-402: The operating system team from two to six programmers. In what is described as a Herculean effort, led by the tireless and energetic Howarth (who completed his Ph.D. in physics at age 22), the team eventually delivered a Supervisor consisting of 35,000 lines of assembler language which had support for multiprogramming to solve the problem of peripheral handling. The first Atlas was built up at
11739-612: 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
11868-457: 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
11997-511: 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
12126-541: The overheating problem was solved by introducing refrigeration to the supercomputer design. Thus, 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
12255-437: The second biggest in music history behind that of Michael Jackson. Apple Records , the record label representing The Beatles , launched a suit against EMI for non-payment of royalties on 15 December 2005. The suit alleged that EMI had withheld $ 50 million from the record label; however, an EMI spokesman noted that audits of record label accounts are not that unusual, confirming at least two hundred such audits performed on
12384-681: The services of their operating systems. Atlas pioneered many software concepts still in common use today, including the Atlas Supervisor , "considered by many to be the first recognisable modern operating system". One of the first high-level languages available on Atlas was named Atlas Autocode , which was contemporary to Algol 60 and created specifically to address what Tony Brooker perceived to be some defects in Algol ;60. The Atlas did however support Algol 60 , as well as Fortran and COBOL , and ABL (Atlas Basic Language,
12513-605: 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
12642-532: The summer of 1958, there was still no funding available from the NRDC. Kilburn decided to move things along by building a smaller Muse to experiment with various concepts. This was paid for using funding from the Mark 1 Computer Earnings Fund, which collected funds by renting out time on the University's Mark 1. Soon after the project started, in October 1958, Ferranti decided to become involved. In May 1959 they received
12771-439: The supercomputer at any one time. Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and Manchester University and 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
12900-444: 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
13029-605: 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 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
13158-559: 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) EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries , also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI )
13287-406: 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
13416-422: 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
13545-536: The university throughout 1962. The schedule was further constrained by the planned shutdown of the Ferranti Mercury machine at the end of December. Atlas met this goal, and was officially commissioned on 7 December by John Cockcroft , director of the AEA. This system had only an early version of Supervisor, and the only compiler was for Autocode . It was not until January 1964 that the final version of Supervisor
13674-513: The world are held in EMI's temperature-controlled archive in Hayes, some of which have been released on CD since 2008 by Honest Jon's Records . In 1931, the year the company was formed, it opened the legendary recording studios at London 's Abbey Road . During the 1930s and 1940s, its roster of artists included Arturo Toscanini , Sir Edward Elgar , and Otto Klemperer , among many others. During this time EMI appointed its first A&R managers. These included George Martin , who later brought
13803-519: The world at that time. In 1967, while shifting their focus on pop and rock music roster to Columbia and Parlophone, EMI converted HMV solely to a classical music label exclusively. For the emerging progressive rock genre including Pink Floyd , who had debuted on Columbia, EMI established a new subsidiary label, Harvest Records , two years later. In 1971, Electric & Musical Industries changed its name to EMI Ltd. and on 1 January 1973 EMI phased out most of its heritage labels and replacing them with
13932-442: The year ended March 2009, including write-downs on the value of its music catalogue. In addition, KPMG issued a going concern warning on the holding company's accounts regarding an ability to remain solvent. Citigroup (which held $ 4 billion in debt) took 100% ownership of EMI Group from Terra Firma Capital Partners on 1 February 2011, writing off £2.2 billion of debt and reducing EMI's debt load by 65%. The group
14061-511: 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
14190-624: 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
14319-532: Was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At the time of its acquisition by Universal Music in 2012, it was the fourth largest business group and record label conglomerate in the music industry , and was one of the "Big Four" record companies (now the " Big Three "). Its labels included EMI Records , Parlophone , Virgin Records , and Capitol Records , which are now referenced under Universal Music due to their acquisition with
14448-688: Was a joint venture between EMI itself and Pied Piper Records Corporation. The physical audio and video products of the label have been distributed in South-East Asia by Warner Music Group since December 2008, while new EMI releases in China and Taiwan, were distributed under Gold Typhoon which was previously known as EMI Music China and EMI Music Taiwan, respectively. Meanwhile, the Korean branch of EMI (known as EMI Korea Limited) had its physical releases distributed by Warner Music Korea. EMI Music Japan ,
14577-545: Was also for many years an internationally respected manufacturer of photomultipliers . This part of the business was transferred to Thorn as part of Thorn-EMI, then later became the independent concern Electron Tubes Ltd. The EMI Electronic Business Machine, a valve and magnetic drum memory computer, was built in the 1950s to process the British Motor Corporation payroll. In 1958 the EMIDEC 1100 ,
14706-668: Was awarded a prestigious Queen's Award for Technological Innovation for what was then called the EMI scanner , and in 1979 Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize for his accomplishment. After brief, but brilliant, success in the medical imaging field, EMI's manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies, notably Thorn (see Thorn EMI ). Subsequently, development and manufacturing activities were sold off to other companies and work moved to other towns such as Crawley and Wells. Emihus Electronics, based in Glenrothes , Scotland,
14835-626: 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 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
14964-737: Was decommissioned in 1971. The final Atlas, the CADCentre machine, was switched off in late 1976. Parts of the Chilton Atlas are preserved by National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh ; the main console itself was rediscovered in July 2014 and is at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, near Oxford . Through 1956 there was a growing awareness that the UK was falling behind the US in computer development. In April, B.W. Pollard of Ferranti told
15093-545: Was dedicated to the "Atlas Computer and the Invention of Virtual Memory 1957-1962". The machine had many innovative features, but the key operating parameters were as follows (the store size relates to the Manchester installation; the others were larger): Atlas did not use a synchronous clocking mechanism — it was an asynchronous processor — so performance measurements were not easy, but as an example: One feature of
15222-426: Was described as an experiment). In May 2006, EMI attempted to buy Warner Music Group , which would have reduced the world's four largest record companies ( Big Four ) to three; however, the bid was rejected. Warner Music Group launched a Pac-Man defense , offering to buy EMI. EMI rejected the $ 4.6 billion offer. After a decline in the British market share from 16% to 9%, and the announcement that it had sustained
15351-500: Was entitled Let It Be . The photo was used instead for the cover of the Beatles' second greatest-hits double-disc compilation entitled 1967–1970 (also known as "The Blue Album"). (The two compilations were released in 1973.) EMI's classical artists of the period were largely limited to the prestigious British and European orchestras, such as the Philharmonia Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra as well as
15480-558: Was estimated that the computer time received by the University would cost £720,000 if it had been leased on the open market. The machine was shut down on 30 November 1971. Ferranti sold two other Atlas installations, one to a joint consortium of University of London and BP in 1963, and another to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell) in December 1964. The AEA machine was later moved to
15609-575: Was having serious financial difficulties in the early 1960s, and decided to sell the computer division to International Computers and Tabulators (ICT) in 1963. ICT decided to focus on the mid-range market with their ICT 1900 series , a flexible range of machines based on the Canadian Ferranti-Packard 6000 . The Atlas was highly regarded by many in the computer industry. Among its admirers was C. Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corporation , who later praised it: In architecture,
15738-507: Was installed, along with compilers for ALGOL 60 and Fortran . By the mid-1960s the original machine was in continual use, based on a 20-hour-per-day schedule, during which time as many as 1,000 programs might be run. Time was split between the University and Ferranti, the latter of which charged £500 an hour to its customers. A portion of this was returned to the University Computer Earnings Fund. In 1969, it
15867-526: Was later settled following a defence based on a contract case involving actress Olivia de Havilland decades before. Jared Leto explained, "The California Appeals Court ruled that no service contract in California is valid after seven years, and it became known as the De Havilland Law after she used it to get out of her contract with Warner Bros. " Many industry watchers viewed the suit as
15996-577: Was not until 1964's arrival of the CDC 6600 that the Atlas was significantly bested. CDC later stated that it was a 1959 description of Muse that gave CDC ideas that significantly accelerated the development of the 6600 and allowed it to be delivered earlier than originally estimated. This led to it winning a contract for the CSIRO in Australia, which had originally been in discussions to buy an Atlas. Ferranti
16125-553: Was owned 51% by Hughes Aircraft , of California, US, and 49% by EMI. It manufactured integrated circuits , electrolytic capacitors and, for a short period in the mid-1970s, hand-held calculators under the Gemini name. Early in its life, the Gramophone Company established its subsidiary operations and branch offices in a number of many other countries inside and outside of the British Commonwealth , including Europe,
16254-426: Was put up for sale and final bids were due by 5 October 2011. On 12 November 2011, it was announced that EMI would sell its recorded music operations to Universal Music Group (UMG) for £1.2 billion ($ 1.9 billion) and its music publishing operations to Sony/ATV Music Publishing -for $ 2.2 billion. Among the other companies that had competed for the recorded music business was Warner Music Group which
16383-457: Was the only region in the world where EMI was not in operation, although the record label continued to operate in Hong Kong and Indonesia (which was named Arka Music Indonesia). The Chinese and Taiwanese operation of EMI as well as the Hong Kong branch of Gold Label, was sold to Typhoon Group and reformed as Gold Typhoon . The Philippine branch of EMI changed its name to PolyEast Records , and
16512-771: 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
16641-483: Was used for the cover of the Beatles' first double-disc greatest-hits compilation entitled 1962–1966 (also known as "The Red Album"). In 1969, Angus McBean took a matching group photograph featuring the boys in long hair and beards to contrast with the earlier cleancut image to show that the boys could have appeal across a wide range of audiences. This photo was originally intended for the Get Back album which later
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