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A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s. Starting with CM-1, the machines were intended originally for applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.
Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on massively parallel computing architectures into a commercial product named the Connection Machine. The company moved in 1984 from Waltham to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the MIT AI Lab. Thinking Machines made some of the most powerful supercomputers of the time, and by 1993 the four fastest computers in the world were Connection Machines. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 1994; its hardware and parallel computing software divisions were acquired in time by Sun Microsystems.
Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produced hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world were based on Quadrics' interconnect. They officially closed on June 29, 2009.
Forschungszentrum Jülich is a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and is one of the largest interdisciplinary research centres in Europe. It was founded on 11 December 1956 by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as a registered association, before it became "Kernforschungsanlage Jülich GmbH" or Nuclear Research Centre Jülich in 1967. In 1990, the name of the association was changed to "Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH". It has close collaborations with RWTH Aachen in the form of Jülich-Aachen Research Alliance (JARA).
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for over thirty years.
The Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) was a massively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospace for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than other existing supercomputer architectures, by using thousands of simple processing elements, rather than one or a few highly complex CPUs. Development of the MPP began circa 1979; it was delivered in May 1983, and was in general use from 1985 until 1991.
Norman Howard Christ is a physicist and a professor at Columbia University, where he holds the Ephraim Gildor Professorship of Computational Theoretical Physics. He is notable for his research in Lattice QCD.
Nicola Cabibbo was an Italian physicist, best known for his work on the weak interaction.
The QCDOC is a supercomputer technology focusing on using relatively cheap low power processing elements to produce a massively parallel machine. The machine is custom-made to solve small but extremely demanding problems in the fields of quantum physics.
Eurotech is a company dedicated to the research, development, production and marketing of miniature computers (NanoPCs) and high performance computers (HPCs).
The Slurm Workload Manager, or Slurm, is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels, used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.
The Hitachi SR2201 was a distributed memory parallel system that was introduced in March 1996 by Hitachi. Its processor, the 150 MHz HARP-1E based on the PA-RISC 1.1 architecture, solved the cache miss penalty by pseudo vector processing (PVP). In PVP, data was loaded by prefetching to a special register bank, bypassing the cache. Each processor had a peak performance of 300 MFLOPS, giving the SR2201 a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS. Up to 2048 RISC processors could be connected via a high-speed three-dimensional crossbar network, which was able to transfer data at 300 MB/s over each link.
India's Supercomputer Programme was started in late 1980s, precisely during the 3rd quarter of 1987, in New Delhi for Software, in Bangalore for Hardware, and in Pune for Firmware, while Sam Pitroda, Advisor to C-DOT, and C-DOT's Indigenous Architecture and Design Team constituted by its Senior Member Technical Staff / Senior Programme Managers including Mohan C. Subramaniyam alias Mohan Rose Ali, Periasamy Muthiah, and Leslie D'Souza had all worked hard at the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), after successfully completing their 3 years mission on designing the Nation's first ever indigenous C-DOT Digital Switching System - DSS, to create C-DOT's Indigenous Super-computing Machine called CHIPPS - C-DOT High-Performance Parallel Processing System, because the contracted Cray X-MP Supercomputers were denied for export to India which was under the Statesmanship and Stewardship of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, due to an arms embargo imposed by US on India during Ronald Reagan's Presidential Administration, for it was a dual-use technology and it could be used for developing indigenous Strategic Defense Systems by India.
The main credit to supercomputers goes to the inventor of CDC -6600, Seymour Cray. The history of supercomputing goes back to the early 1920s in the United States with the IBM tabulators at Columbia University and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC), designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day, such as the 1954 IBM NORC, the 1960 UNIVAC LARC, and the IBM 7030 Stretch and the Atlas, both in 1962.
Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer architecture. While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been moving away from in-house operating systems and toward some form of Linux, with it running all the supercomputers on the TOP500 list in November 2017.
SUPRENUM was a German research project to develop a parallel computer from 1985 through 1990. It was a major effort which was aimed at developing a national expertise in massively parallel processing both at hardware and at software level.
The high performance supercomputing program started in mid-to-late 1980s in Pakistan. Supercomputing is a recent area of Computer science in which Pakistan has made progress, driven in part by the growth of the information technology age in the country. Developing on the ingenious supercomputer program started in 1980s when the deployment of the Cray supercomputers was initially denied.
RMG is an open source density functional theory electronic structure code distributed under the GNU General Public License. It solves Kohn-Sham equations directly on a 3D real space grid without using basis set functions. RMG is highly scalable; it has been run on supercomputers with thousands of CPU cores.