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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, 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.
The Earth Simulator (ES) is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
OSF/1 is a variant of the Unix operating system developed by the Open Software Foundation during the late 1980s and early 1990s. OSF/1 is one of the first operating systems to have used the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and is probably best known as the native Unix operating system for DEC Alpha architecture systems.
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.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
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 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.
The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, also known as the Seymour Cray Award, is an award given by the IEEE Computer Society, to recognize significant and innovative contributions in the field of high-performance computing. The award honors scientists who exhibit the creativity demonstrated by Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research, Inc., and an early pioneer of supercomputing. Cray was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing," Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. He played a key role in the invention and design of the UNIVAC 1103, a landmark high-speed computer and the first computer available for commercial use.
The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is the national high-performance computing centre of Switzerland. It was founded in Manno, canton Ticino, in 1991. In March 2012, the CSCS moved to its new location in Lugano-Cornaredo.
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.
Advanced Comprehensive Operating System (ACOS) is a family of mainframe computer operating systems developed by NEC for the Japanese market. It consists of three systems, based on the General Comprehensive Operating System family developed by General Electric, Honeywell, and Bull. Two of these systems, ACOS-2 and ACOS-4 are still sold, although only ACOS-4 is under active development. ACOS-6 is an obsolete high-end mainframe platform, which ceased active development in the early 2000s.
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 term supercomputing arose in the late 1920s in the United States in response to the IBM tabulators at Columbia University. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is sometimes considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
The SX-ACE is a vector supercomputer based on the NEC SX series by NEC Corporation. It features NEC's first multi-core System on a Chip vector processor 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.
Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s. Early supercomputer architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. However, in time the demand for increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems.
ACM SIGHPC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners working on research and in professional practice related to supercomputing, high-end computers, and cluster computing. The organization co-sponsors international conferences related to high performance and scientific computing, including: SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis; the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference; Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC); and PPoPP, the Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.
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.
Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Chief Architect for Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Previously, he led the Advanced Application and User Support team at the Blue Waters Directorate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and held an adjunct professor position at the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His expertise lies in large-scale parallel computing and high-performance computing systems. He focuses on applications in large-scale artificial intelligence as well as climate sciences.
References
- ↑ SUPER-UX documentation
- ↑ Kernel Correction
- ↑ Watanabe, Tadashi (1993). "NEC SX-3 Supercomputer System". Supercomputers and Their Performance in Computational Fluid Dynamics. Vol. 37. pp. 63–75. doi:10.1007/978-3-322-87863-2_4. ISBN 978-3-528-07637-5.
- 1 2 3 Nishino, H.; Naka, S.; Ikumi, K.; Leslie, W. (1989). "High performance file system for supercomputing environment" (PDF). Proceedings of the 1989 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing - Supercomputing '89. pp. 747–756. doi:10.1145/76263.76348. ISBN 0897913418. S2CID 1220077 . Retrieved 25 August 2018.
- ↑ Hammond, S.W.; Loft, R.D.; Tannenbaum, P.D. (1996). "Architecture and Application: The Performance of the NEC SX-4 on the NCAR Benchmark Suite" (PDF). Supercomputing '96:Proceedings of the 1996 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing. doi:10.1109/SC.1996.5 . Retrieved 25 August 2018.
- ↑ IWAYA, AKIHIRO; WATANABE, TADASHI (September 1991). "The Parallel Processing Feature of the NEC SX-3 Supercomputer System". International Journal of High Speed Computing. 03 (3n04): 187–197. doi:10.1142/S0129053391000085.
- ↑ TOMARU, Hiroku; MIYAZAKI, Emiko; OHTANI, Atsuhisa; SATAKE, Koji; SAKAI, Satoshi; KITAGAWA, Toshiyuki. "Outline of the SUPER-UX, Operating System for the SX-9" (PDF). NEC. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
- 1 2 Uno, Atsuya (2005). "Software of the Earth Simulator". Journal of the Earth Simulator. 3: 52–59. Bibcode:2005JES.....3...52U. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.528.9349 . doi:10.32131/jes.3.59 (inactive 31 January 2024).
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link) - ↑ Yanagawa, Takashi; Suehiro, Kenji (December 2004). "Software system of the Earth Simulator". Parallel Computing. 30 (12): 1315–1327. doi:10.1016/j.parco.2004.09.005.
- ↑ Carter, Jonathan; Oliker, Leonid; Shalf, John (10 June 2006). "Performance Evaluation of Scientific Applications on Modern Parallel Vector Systems" (PDF). High Performance Computing for Computational Science - VECPAR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 4395. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 490–503. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-71351-7_38. ISBN 978-3-540-71350-0.
