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78-566: Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol , founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor . In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be delayed, Miles Chesney, David Alden, Eric Barton, Roy Bottomley, James Cownie, and Gerry Talbot resigned and formed Meiko ( Japanese for "well-engineered") to start work on massively parallel machines based on
156-571: A SunOS daemon named Sun Virtual Computing Surfaces (SVCS) provided access between the transputer network and the Sun host. As the performance of the transputer became less competitive toward the end of the 1980s (the follow-on T9000 transputer being beset with delays), Meiko added the ability to supplement the transputers with Intel i860 processors. Each i860 board (MK086 or MK096) contained two i860s with up to 32 MB of RAM each, and two T800s providing inter-processor communication. Sometimes known as
234-506: 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
312-560: A customized version of Sun's operating system Solaris , initially Solaris 2.1, later 2.3 and 2.5.1. The processors in a CS-2 were connected by a Meiko-designed multi-stage packet-switched fat tree network implemented in custom silicon. This project, codenamed Elan-Elite, was started in 1990, as a speculative project to compete with the T9000 Transputer from Inmos , which Meiko intended to use as an interconnect technology. The T9000 began to suffer massive delays, such that
390-580: 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
468-457: 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
546-659: 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
624-499: 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
702-422: A mathematical function In economics, a factor of production , a resource employed to produce goods and services Advice (opinion) Impute (disambiguation) Output (disambiguation) Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Input . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to
780-460: A nominal performance of 200 megaflops on double precision arithmetic and double that on single precision . The SuperSPARC processors ran at 40 MHz initially, later increased to 50 MHz. Subsequently, hyperSPARC processors were introduced at 66, 90 or 100 MHz. The CS-2 was intended to scale up to 1024 processors. The largest CS-2 system built was a 224-processor system installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory . The CS-2 ran
858-472: 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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#1732793033195936-483: 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
1014-572: 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
1092-511: 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
1170-415: 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
1248-466: 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
1326-737: 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
1404-505: Is essentially a single-processor operating system with a distributed file system . MeikOS was intended for use with the Meiko Multiple Virtual Computing Surfaces (M²VCS) resource management software, which partitions the processors of a Computing Surface into domains , manages user access to these domains, and provides inter-domain communication. MeikOS has diskless and fileserver variants,
1482-409: 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
1560-684: 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
1638-428: 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
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#17327930331951716-556: 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,
1794-760: 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 ,
1872-613: 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
1950-465: 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
2028-534: The IEEE 754 standard for computer arithmetic. This including all rounding modes, denormalised numbers and square root in hardware without taking any hardware exceptions to complete computation. A SPARCstation 2 design was also developed together with a combined part targeting the SPARCstation 2 ASIC pinout. LSI fabbed and manufactured the separate FPU L64814, as part of their SparKIT chipset. The Meiko design
2106-626: 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
2184-519: 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,
2262-445: 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
2340-584: The CS-1) was a massively parallel supercomputer . The system was based on the Inmos transputer microprocessor , later also using SPARC and Intel i860 processors. The Computing Surface architecture comprised multiple boards containing transputers connected together by their communications links via Meiko-designed link switch chips. A variety of different boards were produced with different transputer variants, random-access memory (RAM) capacities and peripherals. The initial software environments provided for
2418-627: The Computing Surface was Occam Programming System (OPS), Meiko's version of Inmos's D700 Transputer Development System. This was soon superseded by a multi-user version, MultiOPS . Later, Meiko introduced Meiko Multiple Virtual Computing Surfaces (M²VCS), a multi-user resource management system let the processors of a Computing Surface be partitioned into several domains of different sizes. These domains were allocated by M²VCS to individual users, thus allowing several simultaneous users access to their own virtual Computing Surfaces. M²VCS
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2496-670: The Concerto or simply the i860 Computing Surface, these systems had limited success. Meiko also produced a SPARC processor board, the MK083, which allowed the integration of the SunOS operating system into the Computing Surface architecture, similarly to the In-Sun Computing Surface. These were usually used as front-end host processors for transputer or i860 Computing Surfaces. SVCS, or an improved version, called simply VCS
2574-520: 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
2652-520: 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
2730-478: The Meiko Computing Surface uneconomic for many applications. MeikOS (also written as Meikos or MEiKOS ) is a Unix-like transputer operating system developed for the Computing Surface during the late 1980s. MeikOS was derived from an early version of Minix , extensively modified for the Computing Surface architecture. Unlike HeliOS , another Unix-like transputer operating system, MeikOS
2808-573: The Meiko MK083 SPARC processor board, which allow SunOS and Sun Virtual Computing Surfaces (SVCS), later developed as VCS to take over the roles of MeikOS and M²VCS respectively. The last MeikOS release was MeikOS 3.06, in early 1991. This was based on the transputer link protocol. Meiko developed its own switch silicon on and European Silicon Systems, ES2 gate array . This application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) provided static connectivity and limited dynamic connectivity and
2886-650: 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
2964-454: 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 –
3042-546: 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
3120-424: 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
3198-505: 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
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3276-489: The company ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1990s. The technical team and technology was transferred to a joint venture company named Quadrics Supercomputers World Ltd. (QSW), formed by Alenia Spazio of Italy in mid-1996. At Quadrics, the CS-2 interconnect technology was developed into QsNet . As of 2021, a vestigial Meiko website still exists. The Meiko Computing Surface (sometimes retrospectively referred to as
3354-419: 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
3432-430: 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
3510-643: 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
3588-552: 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
3666-408: 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
3744-410: 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
3822-569: 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
3900-534: 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
3978-405: The former running on the seat processor of an M²VCS domain, providing a command line user interface for a given user; the latter running on processors with attached SCSI hard disks, providing a remote file service (named Surface File System (SFS)) to instances of diskless MeikOS. The two can communicate via M²VCS. MeikOS was made obsolete by the introduction of the In-Sun Computing Surface and
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#17327930331954056-768: The free dictionary. Input may refer to: Computing [ edit ] Input (computer science) , the act of entering data into a computer or data processing system Information , any data entered into a computer or data processing system Input device Input method Input port (disambiguation) Input/output (I/O), in computing Other [ edit ] Input (talk show) Input (typeface) International Public Television Screening Conference (INPUT), an international public television organization Input (online magazine) , an online technology and culture magazine owned by Bustle Digital Group See also [ edit ] All pages with titles containing Input Independent variable in
4134-458: The internal project became the only viable interconnect choice for the CS-2. This interconnect comprised two devices, code-named Elan ( adapter ) and Elite ( switch ). Each processing element included an Elan chip, a communications co-processor based on the SPARC architecture, accessed via a Sun MBus cache coherent interface and providing two 50 MB/s bi-directional links. The Elite chip
4212-560: 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
4290-441: 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
4368-612: 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
4446-457: 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
4524-511: 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
4602-541: 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
4680-653: The processor. Nine weeks later in July 1985, they demonstrated a transputer system based on experimental 16-bit transputers at the SIGGRAPH in San Francisco. In 1986, a system based on 32-bit T414 transputers was launched as the Meiko Computing Surface . By 1990, Meiko had sold more than 300 systems and grown to 125 employees. In 1993, Meiko launched the second-generation Meiko CS-2 system, but
4758-605: 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
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#17327930331954836-439: 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
4914-444: 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
4992-605: 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
5070-534: 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) Input [REDACTED] Look up input in Wiktionary,
5148-406: 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
5226-422: 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
5304-511: 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
5382-624: 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
5460-515: Was a commercial non-starter. A chance discussion between McLaren and Andy Bechtolsheim while visiting Sun Microsystems to discuss licensing Solaris caused Meiko to re-target the design for SPARC . Meiko was able to turn around the core FPU design in a short time and LSI Logic fabbed a device for the SPARCstation 1 . A major difference over the T800 FPU was that it fully implemented
5538-514: Was an 8-way link crossbar switch , used to form the packet-switched network . The switch had limited adaption based on load and priority. Both ASICs were fabbed in complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor ( CMOS ) gate arrays by GEC Plessey in their Roborough , Plymouth semi-conductor fab in 1993. After the Meiko technology was acquired by Quadrics , the Elan/Elite interconnect technology
5616-684: 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
5694-473: Was designed by Moray McLaren. The CS-2 was launched in 1993 and was Meiko's second-generation system architecture, superseding the earlier Computing Surface. The CS-2 was an all-new modular architecture based around SuperSPARC or hyperSPARC processors and, optionally, Fujitsu μVP vector processors . These implemented an instruction set similar to the Fujitsu VP2000 vector supercomputer and had
5772-513: Was developed into QsNet . Meiko had hired Fred (Mark) Homewood and Moray McLaren both of whom had been instrumental in the design of the T800 . Together, they designed and developed an improved, higher performance FPU core, owned by Meiko. This was initially targeted at the Intel 80387 instruction set. An ongoing legal battle between Intel, AMD and others over the 80387 made it clear this project
5850-684: Was eventually fully licensed to Sun which went on to use it in the MicroSPARC family of ASICs for several generations in return for a one-off payment and full Solaris source license. 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,
5928-771: 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
6006-520: Was used in conjunction with either OPS or MeikOS , a Unix-like single-processor operating system . In 1988, Meiko launched the In-Sun Computing Surface, which repackaged the Computing Surface into VMEbus boards (designated the MK200 series) suitable for installation in larger Sun-3 or Sun-4 systems. The Sun acted as front-end host system for managing the transputers, running development tools and providing mass storage. A version of M²VCS running as
6084-405: Was used to manage the transputer resources. Computing Surface configurations with multiple MK083 boards were also possible. A major drawback of the Computing Surface architecture was poor I/O bandwidth for general data shuffling. Although aggregate bandwidth for special case data shuffling could be very high, the general case has very poor performance relative to the compute bandwidth. This made
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