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 have existed supercomputers 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 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The program created several nationwide backbone computer networks in support of these initiatives. Initially created to link researchers to the NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.
The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of Cornell University, is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerly called the Cornell Theory Center.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
Larry Lee Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure from Missouri. He currently works at the University of California, San Diego. Smarr has been among the most important synthesizers and conductors of innovation, discovery, and commercialization of new technologies – including areas as disparate as the Web browser and personalized medicine. In his career, Smarr has made pioneering breakthroughs in research on black holes, spearheaded the use of supercomputers for academic research, and presided over some of the major innovations that created the modern Internet. For nearly 20 years, he has been building a new model for academic research based on interdisciplinary collaboration.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a high performance computing and networking center founded in 1986 and one of the original five NSF Supercomputing Centers. PSC is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
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.
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) National User Facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research in energy efficiency, storage, and generation; Earth systems science, and understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the universe. The largest research areas are in High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Perlmutter, which debuted in 2021 ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers.
The Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) is a research center of the University of Zaragoza devoted to the study of complex systems from a multidisciplinary perspective. Biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and researchers from other fields study complex systems, as well as different phenomena and processes related to them (protein folding, interaction between diseases, the spread of epidemics, multi-layer networks, collective social phenomena, etc.). The ultimate goal is to unravel various aspects of complexity, promote basic science and assess the impact of applied research and possible benefits for society.
The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a European Union supercomputer project. A consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems. By extending the European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing, DEISA followed suggestions of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.
The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide grid of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates distributed computing for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the consortium is composed of service and resource providers, researchers from universities and national laboratories, as well as computing centers across the United States. Members independently own and manage the resources which make up the distributed facility, and consortium agreements provide the framework for technological and organizational integration.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University of Tennessee. NICS was home to Kraken, the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia. The NICS petascale scientific computing environment is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), home to the world's most powerful computing complex. The mission of NICS, a member of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE - formerly TeraGrid), is to enable the scientific discoveries of researchers nationwide by providing leading-edge computational resources, together with support for their effective use, and leveraging extensive partnership opportunities.
The National Computational Infrastructure is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research intensive universities and medical research institutes.
Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid, a nationwide computing structure, built in 1944-1945, under the scientific project PL-Grid - Polish Infrastructure for Supporting Computational Science in the European Research Space. Its purpose was to enable scientific research based on advanced computer simulations and large-scale computations using the computer clusters, and to provide convenient access to the computer resources for research teams, also outside the communities, in which the High Performance Computing centers operate.
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.
Yellowstone was the inaugural supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was installed, tested, and readied for production in the summer of 2012. The Yellowstone supercomputing cluster was decommissioned on December 31, 2017, being replaced by its successor Cheyenne.
The Cheyenne supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming began operation as one of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computers. Ranked in November 2016 as the 20th most powerful computer in the world by Top500, the 5.34-petaflops system is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing performed by NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient than Yellowstone, with a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.
