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
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. ...
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.
Germany unveils world's largest weather supercomputer
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Dec 10, 2009 |
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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.
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Dinosaurs hop, skip and jump into 21st century
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Dec 09, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Dinosaurs have literally been put through their paces by a new supercomputer, allowing scientists to get closer to understanding how they once moved.
New computer cluster gets its grunt from games
Technology / Computer Sciences
Nov 25, 2009 |
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Technology designed to blast aliens in computer games is part of a new GPU (Graphics Processing Units) computer cluster that will process CSIRO research data thousands of times faster and more efficiently ...
Black Holes in Star Clusters stir up Time and Space (w/ Video)
Dec 16, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Within a decade scientists could be able to detect the merger of tens of pairs of black holes every year, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Bonn’s Argelander-Institut ...
First Direct Imaging of a Young Binary System
Dec 15, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of astronomers from The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and other universities have captured the first direct image of a young ...
Exploring energy efficiency in multi-scale computing systems
Dec 16, 2009 |
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The University of California, San Diego and nine other universities are members of a new research center charged with finding ways to improve the design of computing systems ranging from large data centers ...
Mathematical model of a simple circuit in a chicken brain raises fundamental questions
Dec 01, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The Web site Neuroanthropology asks visitors to complete this quote, "One of the difficulties in understanding the brain is ...". In addition to the typical facetious remarks, such as "so ...
A Superbright Supernova That’s the First of Its Kind
Dec 02, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- An extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily long-lasting supernova named SN 2007bi, snagged in a search by a robotic telescope, turns out to be the first example of the kind of stars that first ...
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