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 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.
The SX-6 is a NEC SX supercomputer built by NEC Corporation that debuted in 2001; the SX-6 was sold under license by Cray Inc. in the U.S. Each SX-6 single-node system contains up to eight vector processors, which share up to 64 GB of computer memory. The SX-6 processor is a single chip implementation containing a vector processor unit and a scalar processor fabricated in a 0.15 μm CMOS process with copper interconnects, whereas the SX-5 was a multi-chip implementation. The Earth Simulator is based on the SX-6 architecture.
NEC SX describes a series of vector supercomputers designed, manufactured, and marketed by NEC. This computer series is notable for providing the first computer to exceed 1 gigaflop, as well as the fastest supercomputer in the world between 1992–1993, and 2002–2004. The current model, as of 2018, is the SX-Aurora TSUBASA.
The SX-8 is a supercomputer built by NEC Corporation. The SX-8 Series implements an eight-way 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-8 processors run at 2 GHz for vectors and 1 GHz for scalar operations. The SX-8 CPU operates at 16 GFLOPS and can address up to 128 GB of memory. Up to 8 CPUs may be used in a single node, and a complete system may have up to 512 nodes. The SX-8 series ranges from the single-CPU SX-8b system to the SX-8/4096M512, with 512 nodes, 4,096 CPUs, and a peak performance of 65 TFLOPS. There is up to 512 GB/s bandwidth per node. The SX-8 runs SUPER-UX, a Unix-like operating system developed by NEC.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
Magerit is the name of the one of the most powerful supercomputers in Spain. It also reached the second best Spanish position in the TOP500 list of supercomputers. This computer is installed in CeSViMa, a research center of the Technical University of Madrid.
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.
The SPARC64 V (Zeus) is a SPARC V9 microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The SPARC64 V was the basis for a series of successive processors designed for servers, and later, supercomputers.
Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer becoming the world's fastest in June 2011. and Fugaku took the lead in June 2020, and furthered it, as of November 2020, to 3 times faster than number two computer.
Tsubame is a series of supercomputers that operates at the GSIC Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, designed by Satoshi Matsuoka.
Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP.
The SX-ACE is a vector NEC SX supercomputer from NEC Corporation. It features NEC's first multi-core vector System on a Chip design, with four cores. The SX-ACE runs at 1 GHz, has peak performance of 64 GFLOPS per core, and has 64 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth per core. Four cores make up a shared-memory node, and 64 nodes can fit in a rack for a total performance of 16 TFLOPS per rack. The SX-ACE was released in 2013. NEC released the successor, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA in 2017. It is used by Earth Simulator 3.
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.
Nvidia DGX is a line of Nvidia-produced servers and workstations which specialize in using GPGPU to accelerate deep learning applications. The typical design of a DGX system is based upon a rackmount chassis with motherboard that carries high performance x86 server CPUs. The main component of a DGX system is a set of 4 to 16 Nvidia Tesla GPU modules on an independent system board. DGX systems have large heatsinks and powerful fans to adequately cool thousands of watts of thermal output. The GPU modules are typically integrated into the system using a version of the SXM socket.
The NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA is a vector processor of the NEC SX architecture family. Unlike previous SX supercomputers, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA is provided as a PCIe card, termed by NEC as a "Vector Engine" (VE). Eight VE cards can be inserted into a vector host (VH) which is typically a x86-64 server running the Linux operating system. The product has been announced in a press release on 25 October 2017 and NEC has started selling it in February 2018. The product succeeds the SX-ACE.
The A64FX is a 64-bit ARM architecture microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The processor is replacing the SPARC64 V as Fujitsu's processor for supercomputer applications. It powers the Fugaku supercomputer, ranked in theTOP500 as the fastest supercomputer in the world from June of 2020, until falling to second place behind Frontier in June of 2022.
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 200Gb/s Nvidia Mellanox HDR InfiniBand connectivity. Inagurated 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.
