Technology Used In Supercomputer

[seminar class]

Prepared by
T Sandhya Rani

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Introduction
 A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.
 Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by “Seymour Cray” at ”Control Data Corporation” (CDC).
 Since October 2010, the ”Tianhe-1A” supercomputer has been the fastest in the world; it is located in ”China”.
 The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputers tend to become tomorrow's ordinary computers.
 Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling etc
Supercomputer challenges, technologies
 A supercomputer generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled.
 A supercomputer consumes between 1-10 megawatt of electricity and converts all of it into heat.
 The cost to power and cool the system is usually one of the factors that limit the scalability of the system.
 Information cannot move faster than the speed of light between two parts of a supercomputer.
 Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Modern Supercomputer Architecture
 A computer cluster is a collection of computers that are highly interconnected via a high-speed network or switching fabric. Each computer runs under a separate instance of an Operating System (OS).
 A multiprocessing computer is a computer, operating under a single OS and using more than one CPU, wherein the application-level software is indifferent to the number of processors.
 Measuring Supercomputer Speed
 In general, the speed of a supercomputer is measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations PerSecond).
 "TFLOPS" (10^12 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops).
 "PFLOPS" (10^15FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.).
Research And Development
 IBM is developing the “cyclops64” architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip".
 Other PFLOPS projects include one by ”Narendra Karmarkar” in India.
 IBM is constructing a 20 PFLOPs supercomputer at ”Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory”, named “Sequoia”, which is scheduled to go online in 2011.
Conclusion
 As the Technology has improved a lot we need to go with supercomputers to reach the standards of the developed countries.
 Though the cost of introducing the supercomputers is expensive we have the need of these.