1. Super Computers
By Phuong Vo

2. What is a Supercomputer?
Supercomputer is a broad term for one of
the fastest computer currently available.
Super computers were designed and built
to work on extremely large jobs that could
not be handled by no other types of
computing systems.

3. What is a Supercomputer? (cont’d)
Supercomputers speed are measured in
floating point operations per second
(FLOPS) in units of
megaflops (MFOPS)
gigaflops (GFLOPS)
teraflops (TFLOPS)

4. What are Supercomputers Used For?
scientific simulations
animated graphics
analysis of geological data
nuclear energy research and meteorology
computational fluid dynamics

5. Early History Supercomputer.
Seymour Clay made the first transistorized computer (CDC 1604) in 1964.
In 1965 Cray developed CDC 6600, the first multithreading computer. Cray then developed the CDC 7600 in 1970.
Cray-1 supercomputers project started in 1972 and finished in 1974 and was twice as fast as the 7600 with a vector speed of 80 MFLOPS.

6. Early History of Supercomputer. (cont’d)
In 1990 Cray successful build Cray-4 the fastest supercomputer in the world at around 10 gigaflops and was smaller than a human brain.
Cray died on October 5th 1996 at the age of 71 as a result of injuries sustained in an automobile accident.
Currently the fastest computer is
IBM BlueGene/L at around 73
teraflops (TFLOPS)

7. Parallel Processing Two common type used in supercomputers. Cluster
Multi-Processor

8. Cluster Computers Cluster computers are two or more
computers working parallel to achieve
greater performances. Cluster computers
breakup work among the computers in the
cluster.

9. Cluster Computers (cont’d)
Each computer in the cluster is a cpu itself with its own processor, memory, and disk.
The computers communicate with each other via an interconnecting bus.

10. Xbox Cluster www.anandtech.com successfully built a XBOX Linux cluster
consisting of 8 XBOXs.
XBOX specs:
PIII 733MHz 128K L2
Seagate 5400RPM 8GB
64MB Shared PC3200

11. Xbox Cluster (cont’d) Performance Benchmarks Distributed Compiling
Distributed Rendering

12. Multi-Processor A multi-processor computer has 2 or more
cpus. Each processor is capable of running
different program simultaneously (true
multitasking).

13. Multi-Processor (cont’d)
The cpus all shared the other parts of the computers: memory, disk system, bus, etc.
Cpu communicate via memory and the system bus.
Cheaper than cluster computers but does not perform as well.

14. Advantages of Parallel Processing
Costs are much cheaper than building one supercomputer.
Highly scalable.

15. Disadvantages of parallel processing.
High overload – it is difficult to make many processor work together efficiently.
It is difficult to write programs to utilize multiple processors at once in an efficient manner.

16. References www.anandtech.com