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
Scientists Write Guide to Build Supercomputer from Sony Playstation 3
Dec 17, 2008 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide to building a home-brewed supercomputer that can reduce the cost of ...
World's largest laser opens (w/Video)
May 29, 2009 |
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Scientists for decades have been hunting for ways to harness the enormous force of the sun and stars to supply energy here on Earth. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory may spark the light ...
Fujitsu develops world's fastest processor
May 15, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Japanese computer maker Fujitsu Ltd. said Wednesday that it has successfully developed the world's fastest supercomputer processing unit with more than twice the speed of the current leader.
Scientists discover oldest words in the English language, predict which ones are likely to disappear
Feb 26, 2009 |
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The oldest words in the English language include "I" and "who", while words like "dirty" could die out relatively quickly, British researchers said Thursday.
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 ...
Moving Quarks Help Solve Proton Spin Puzzle
Sep 11, 2008 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- New theory work at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has shown that more than half of the spin of the proton is the result of the movement of its building blocks: ...
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 ...
Engineering researchers: Novo-G supercomputer fastest of its type in world
Technology / Computer Sciences
Jul 23, 2009 |
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A supercomputer named Novo-G described by its lead designer as likely the most powerful computer of its kind in the world became operational this week at the University of Florida.
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 ...
IBM To Build Supercomputer For U.S. Government
Feb 03, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The U.S. Government has contracted out IBM to build a massive supercomputer bigger than any supercomputer out there. The supercomputer system, called Sequoia, will be capable of delivering ...
New supercomputer to reel in answers to some of Earth's problems (w/ Video)
Jul 27, 2009 |
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The newest supercomputer in town is almost 15 times faster than its predecessor and ready to take on problems in areas such as climate science, hydrogen storage and molecular chemistry. The $21.4 million Chinook ...
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 ...
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.
New technology enables high-speed data transfer
Jun 18, 2009 |
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GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a ...
Supercomputing gets its own superhero
Technology / Computer Sciences
Apr 06, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- What’s faster than the speediest supercomputer? How about a high-speed grid linking 12 world-class supercomputers? That’s what a European research consortium has built, catalysing European ...
