supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation (or both). At any given time, there are usually a few well-publicized supercomputers that operate at the very latest and always incredible speeds. The term is also sometimes applied to far slower (but still impressively fast) computers. Most supercomputers are really multiple computers that perform parallel processing. In general, there are two parallel processing approaches: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP). Perhaps the best-known builder of supercomputers has been Cray Research, now a part of Silicon Graphics. Some supercomputers are at "supercomputer center," usually university research centers, some of which, in the United States, are interconnected on an Internet backbone known as vBNS or NSFNet. This network is the foundation for an evolving network infrastructure known as the National Technology Grid. Internet2 is a university-led project that is part of this initiative. At the high end of supercomputing are computers like IBM's "Blue Pacific," announced on October 29, 1998. Built in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California., Blue Pacific is reported to operated at 3.9 teraflop (trillion operations per second), 15,000 times faster than the average personal computer. It consists of 5,800 processors containing a total of 2.6 trilllion bytes of memory and interconnected with five miles of cable. It was built to simulate the physics of a nuclear explosion. IBM is also building an academic supercomputer for the San Diego Supercomputer Center that will operate at 1 teraflop. It's based on IBM's RISC System/6000 and the AIX operating system and will have 1,000 microprocessors with IBM's own POWER3 chip. At the lower end of supercomputing, a new trend, called clustering, suggests more of a build-it-yourself approach to supercomputing. The Beowulf Project offers guidance on how to "strap together" a number of off-the-shelf personal computer processors, using Linux operating systems, and interconnecting the processors with Fast Ethernet. Applications must be written to manage the parallel processing.
|
|
|
| Last updated on:
May 07, 2008 |
|
