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.
For more information about Supercomputer, read the full article at
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News tagged with supercomputer
Air Force grant to tighten online encryption
Technology / Computer Sciences
Dec 14, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientist Rafael Pass is seeking new approaches to cryptographic security with a $600,000, five-year grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
3-D microchips for more powerful and environmentally friendly computers
Dec 11, 2009 |
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Not so long ago our computers had a single core which had to be boosted for performance - making each machine into a great central heating system. Beyond 85° C, however, electronic components become unstable. ...
Germany unveils world's largest weather supercomputer
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Dec 10, 2009 |
3.3 / 5 (4) |
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Germany Thursday unveiled the world's most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
More than powerful: German research computer QPACE is the most energy efficient in the world
Nov 20, 2009 |
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At the 2009 Supercomputing Conference in Portland, Oregon, the high-performance computer QPACE (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell) was recognized today as the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.
FutureGrid to provide platform for experimental computation
Technology / Computer Sciences
Nov 17, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Over the next few months, a consortium that includes the University of Chicago will establish FutureGrid, a collaborative next-generation system for experimental scientific supercomputing.
Oak Ridge 'Jaguar' supercomputer is World's fastest
Nov 16, 2009 |
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An upgrade to a Cray XT5 high-performance computing system deployed by the Department of Energy has made the "Jaguar" supercomputer the world's fastest. Located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Jaguar is ...
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 |
3 / 5 (1) |
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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 |
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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.
