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, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
In computing, floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.
The Earth Simulator (ES) is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
ASCI Blue Pacific was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, CA at the end of 1998. It was a collaboration between IBM and LLNL.
ASCI Blue Mountain is a supercomputer installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was designed to run simulations for the United States National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program. The computer was a collaboration between Silicon Graphics Corporation and Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was installed in 1998.
Scalable POWERparallel (SP) is a series of supercomputers from IBM. SP systems were part of the IBM RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) family, and were also called the RS/6000 SP. The first model, the SP1, was introduced in February 1993, and new models were introduced throughout the 1990s until the RS/6000 was succeeded by eServer pSeries in October 2000. The SP is a distributed memory system, consisting of multiple RS/6000-based nodes interconnected by an IBM-proprietary switch called the High Performance Switch (HPS). The nodes are clustered using software called PSSP, which is mainly written in Perl.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
The SX-9 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation. The SX-9 Series implements an SMP system in a compact node module and uses an enhanced version of the single chip vector processor that was introduced with the SX-6. The NEC SX-9 processors run at 3.2 GHz, with eight-way replicated vector pipes, each having two multiply units and two addition units; this results in a peak vector performance of 102.4 gigaFLOPS. For non-vectorized code, there is a scalar processor that runs at half the speed of the vector unit, i.e. 1.6 GHz. Up to 16 CPUs and 1 terabyte of memory may be used in a single node. Each node is packaged in an air-cooled cabinet, similar in size to a standard 42U computer rack. The SX-9 series ranges from the single-node SX-9/B system with 4 CPUs to the maximum expansion stage with 512 nodes, 8,192 CPUs, and 970 TFLOPS peak performance. There is up to 4 TB/s shared memory bandwidth per node and 2×128 GB/s node interconnect bandwidth. The operating system is NEC's SUPER-UX, a Unix-like OS.
Magerit is one of the most powerful supercomputers in Spain. It also reached the second best Spanish position in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. It is installed in CeSViMa, a research center of the Technical University of Madrid.
JUGENE was a supercomputer built by IBM for Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. It was based on the Blue Gene/P and succeeded the JUBL based on an earlier design. It was at the introduction the second fastest computer in the world, and the month before its decommissioning in July 2012 it was still at the 25th position in the TOP500 list. The computer was owned by the "Jülich Supercomputing Centre" (JSC) and the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing.
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.
IBM Sequoia was a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012. Sequoia was dismantled in 2020, its last position on the top500.org list was #22 in the November 2019 list.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
ASC Purple was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The computer was a collaboration between IBM Corporation and Lawrence Livermore Lab. Announced November 19, 2002, it was installed in July 2005 and decommissioned on November 10, 2010. The contract for this computer along with the Blue Gene/L supercomputer was worth US $290 million. As of November 2009, the computer ranked 66th on the TOP500 supercomputer list.
The K computer – named for the Japanese word/numeral "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer was based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It was used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system was based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.
Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer being the world's fastest from June 2011 to June 2012, and Fugaku holding the lead from June 2020 until June 2022.
The PRIMEHPC FX10 is a supercomputer designed and manufactured by Fujitsu. Announced on 7 November 2011 at the Supercomputing Conference, the PRIMEHPC FX10 is an improved and commercialized version of the K computer, which was the first supercomputer to obtain more than 10 PFLOPS on the LINPACK benchmark. In its largest configuration, the PRIMEHPC FX10 has a peak performance 23.2 PFLOPS, power consumption of 22.4 MW, and a list price of US$655.4 million. It was succeeded by the PRIMEHPC FX100 with SPARC64 XIfx processors in 2015.
Leonardo is a petascale supercomputer located at the CINECA datacenter in Bologna, Italy. The system consists of an Atos BullSequana XH2000 computer, with close to 14,000 Nvidia Ampere GPUs and 200Gbit/s Nvidia Mellanox HDR InfiniBand connectivity. Inaugurated in November 2022, Leonardo is capable of 250 petaflops, making it one of the top five fastest supercomputers in the world. It debuted on the TOP500 in November 2022 ranking fourth in the world, and second in Europe.
