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.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
SUPER-UX was a version of the Unix operating system from NEC that is used on its SX series of supercomputers.
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 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.
In computer science, partitioned global address space (PGAS) is a parallel programming model paradigm. PGAS is typified by communication operations involving a global memory address space abstraction that is logically partitioned, where a portion is local to each process, thread, or processing element. The novelty of PGAS is that the portions of the shared memory space may have an affinity for a particular process, thereby exploiting locality of reference in order to improve performance. A PGAS memory model is featured in various parallel programming languages and libraries, including: Coarray Fortran, Unified Parallel C, Split-C, Fortress, Chapel, X10, UPC++, Coarray C++, Global Arrays, DASH and SHMEM. The PGAS paradigm is now an integrated part of the Fortran language, as of Fortran 2008 which standardized coarrays.
The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign was established in 2005 to conduct research at the intersection of high performance computing and humanities, arts, and social science. I-CHASS is hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and maintains strategic partnerships with NCSA, the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC), and the Illinois Informatics Institute (I3).
Global Arrays, or GA, is the library developed by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for parallel computing. GA provides a friendly API for shared-memory programming on distributed-memory computers for multidimensional arrays. The GA library is a predecessor to the GAS languages currently being developed for high-performance computing.
Hamid Reza Arabnia is a professor of computer science at the University of Georgia, United States. He has been the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Supercomputing since 1997.
Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a consortium of major national supercomputing centres in Europe. Initiated in 2002, it became a European Union funded supercomputer project. The consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems by creating a European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing.
SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is the annual conference established in 1988 by the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. In 2019, about 13,950 people participated overall; by 2022 attendance had rebounded to 11,830 both in-person and online. The not-for-profit conference is run by a committee of approximately 600 volunteers who spend roughly three years organizing each conference.
China operates a number of supercomputer centers which, altogether, hold 29.3% performance share of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers. China's Sunway TaihuLight ranks third in the TOP500 list.
Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. As of June 2023, the AIRAWAT supercomputer is the fastest supercomputer in India, having been ranked 75th fastest in the world in the TOP500 supercomputer list. AIRAWAT has been installed at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally 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.
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.
The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense n by n system of linear equations Ax = b, which is a common task in engineering.
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.
Martin Ostoja-Starzewski is a Polish-Canadian-American scientist and engineer, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research includes work on deterministic and stochastic mechanics: random and fractal media, representative elementary volume in linear and nonlinear material systems, universal elastic anisotropy index, random fields, and bridging continuum mechanics to fluctuation theorem.
JUWELS is a supercomputer developed by Atos and hosted by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich. It is capable of a theoretical peak of 70.980 petaflops and it serves as the replacement of the now out-of-operation JUQUEEN supercomputer. JUWELS Booster Module was ranked as the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world at its debut on the November 2000 TOP500 list. The JUWELS Booster Module is part of a modular system architecture and a second Xeon based JUWELS Cluster Module ranked separately as the 44th fastest supercomputer in the world on the November 2000 TOP500 list.
