Supercomputer
hideA supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash".
Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. As of July 2009[update], the IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's ordinary computer. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel to become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Opteron, or Xeon, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.
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News tagged with supercomputer
Roadrunner supercomputer simulates nanoscale material failure
Oct 29, 2009 |
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Very tiny wires, called nanowires, made from such metals as silver and gold, may play a crucial role as electrical or mechanical switches in the development of future-generation ultrasmall nanodevices.
Roadrunner supercomputer models nonlinear physics of high-power lasers
Oct 28, 2009 |
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For years scientists have struggled with the difficult physics of inertial confinement fusion. This is the attempt to compress a target capsule containing isotopes of hydrogen with high-powered lasers to high enough pressure ...
Scientists use world's fastest supercomputer to create the largest HIV evolutionary tree
Medicine & Health / HIV & AIDS
Oct 27, 2009 |
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Supporting Los Alamos National Laboratory's role in the international Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) consortium, researchers are using the Roadrunner supercomputer to analyze vast quantities of genetic sequences ...
Scientists use world's fastest supercomputer to model origins of the unseen universe
Oct 26, 2009 |
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Understanding dark energy is the number one issue in explaining the universe, according to Salman Habib, of the Laboratory's Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group.
Science at the petascale: Roadrunner supercomputer results unveiled
Oct 26, 2009 |
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The world's fastest supercomputer, Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory has completed its initial "shakedown" phase doing accelerated petascale computer modeling and simulations of a variety of unclassified, fundamental ...
Georgia Tech wins NSF award for next-gen supercomputing
Technology / Computer Sciences
Oct 21, 2009 |
not rated yet |
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The Georgia Institute of Technology today announced its receipt of a five-year, $12 million Track 2 award from the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure to lead a partnership of academic, industry and ...
Predictive simulation successes on Dawn supercomputer
Sep 30, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The 500-teraFLOPS Advanced Simulation and Computing program's Sequoia Initial Delivery System (Dawn), an IBM machine of the same lineage as BlueGene/L, has immediately proved itself useful ...
New INL project will improve nuclear reactor simulations
Sep 25, 2009 |
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A new project at Idaho National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory will improve the way scientists model the inner workings of nuclear reactors.
Saudi aims for moon with new hi-tech research oasis
Sep 23, 2009 |
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Saudi Arabia was on Wednesday to launch a new hi-tech mixed-sex university on the Red Sea coast aimed at catapulting the kingdom into the forefront of global technological research.
How do you say grid computing in Spanish?
Sep 10, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Encouraged by the success of grid computing in Europe, scientists there set out to help their Latin American colleagues develop grid capability. The result today is a thriving trans-Atlantic collaboration. ...
SDSC dashes forward with new flash memory computer system
Sep 02, 2009 |
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Leveraging lightning-fast technology already familiar to many from the micro storage world of digital cameras, thumb drives and laptop computers, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, ...
New grant to enhance world's largest open computing network
Technology / Computer Sciences
Aug 31, 2009 |
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A $30 million National Science Foundation grant will enable the University of Chicago to expand and extend until 2011 the operation of TeraGrid, a national system of interconnected supercomputers devoted to leading-edge scientific ...
Making global science networking more user-friendly
Technology / Computer Sciences
Aug 27, 2009 |
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Scientists working collaboratively, at the same time, but in different locations around the world, can now do so thanks to ultra-high-speed, broadband networks and special software developed as part of a National Science ...
Cystorm supercomputer unleashes 28.16 trillion calculations per second
Aug 21, 2009 |
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Srinivas Aluru recently stepped between the two rows of six tall metal racks, opened up the silver doors and showed off the 3,200 computer processor cores that power Cystorm, Iowa State University's second ...
First black holes born starving (w/ Video)
Aug 10, 2009 |
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The first black holes in the universe had dramatic effects on their surroundings despite the fact that they were small and grew very slowly, according to recent supercomputer simulations carried out by astrophysicists ...
