A supercomputer is a type of 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.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
Daresbury Laboratory is a scientific research laboratory based at Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Daresbury in Halton, Cheshire, England. The laboratory began operations in 1962 and was officially opened on 16 June 1967 as the Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory (DNPL) by the then Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Harold Wilson. It was the second national laboratory established by the British National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science, following the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory. It is operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, part of UK Research and Innovation. As of 2018, it employs around 300 staff, with Paul Vernon appointed as director in November 2020, taking over from Professor Susan Smith who had been director from 2012.
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.
In computing, performance per watt is a measure of the energy efficiency of a particular computer architecture or computer hardware. Literally, it measures the rate of computation that can be delivered by a computer for every watt of power consumed. This rate is typically measured by performance on the LINPACK benchmark when trying to compare between computing systems: an example using this is the Green500 list of supercomputers. Performance per watt has been suggested to be a more sustainable measure of computing than Moore's Law.
The IBM HPC Systems Scientific Computing User Group (ScicomP) was a non-profit user-led group for scientific and technical users of IBM high-performance computing (HPC) systems. It was part of the SPXXL organization. It held yearly meetings with presentations to allow users share expertise and collaborate on the development of efficient and scalable scientific applications. Though not affiliated with the IBM Corporation, the group's meetings provide an opportunity to give feedback to IBM that would influence the design of future systems.
Shaheen is the name of a series of supercomputers owned and operated by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Shaheen is named after the Peregrine Falcon. The most recent model, Shaheen II, is the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
Eurotech is a company dedicated to the research, development, production and marketing of miniature computers (NanoPCs) and high performance computers (HPCs).
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Appro was a developer of supercomputing supporting High Performance Computing (HPC) markets focused on medium- to large-scale deployments. Appro was based in Milpitas, California with a computing center in Houston, Texas, and a manufacturing and support subsidiary in South Korea and Japan.
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States of America. As of June 2024, it is the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list. It held the number 1 position on this list from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in High Performance Computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union–level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and participating associated states of the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undertaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 under the control of the European Commission and became autonomous in 2020.
Aurora is an exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. It has been the second fastest supercomputer in the world since 2023. It is expected that after optimizing its performance it will exceed 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the fastest computer ever.
JUWELS is a supercomputer developed by Atos and hosted by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich.
