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
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 ...
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.
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NASA Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest
Space & Earth / Space Exploration
Nov 19, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's premiere supercomputer located at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., has garnered the sixth spot on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful computers.
Solving big problems with new quantum algorithm
Nov 09, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In a recently published paper, Aram Harrow at the University of Bristol and colleagues from MIT in the United States have discovered a quantum algorithm that solves large problems much faster ...
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 ...
Scientists to develop 'swarms' of miniature robotic ocean explorers (w/ Video)
Space & Earth / Earth Sciences
Nov 10, 2009 |
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In an effort to plug gaps of knowledge about key ocean processes, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have been awarded nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation ...
Computer Based on Insights From The Brain Moves Closer to Reality
Technology / Computer Sciences
Nov 18, 2009 |
4.6 / 5 (24) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Today at SC 09, the supercomputing conference, IBM announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, ...
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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