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A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a
general-purpose computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These progr ...
. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in
floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be r ...
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. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of
computational science Computational science, also known as scientific computing or scientific computation (SC), is a field in mathematics that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science that spans many dis ...
, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting,
climate research Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , ''-logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of study ...
, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft
aerodynamics Aerodynamics, from grc, ἀήρ ''aero'' (air) + grc, δυναμική (dynamics), is the study of the motion of air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dyn ...
, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). They have been essential in the field of
cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades the fastest were made by Seymour Cray at
Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeyw ...
(CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. The first such machines were highly tuned conventional designs that ran more quickly than their more general-purpose contemporaries. Through the decade, increasing amounts of parallelism were added, with one to four processors being typical. In the 1970s,
vector processor In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ...
s operating on large arrays of data came to dominate. A notable example is the highly successful
Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...
of 1976. Vector computers remained the dominant design into the 1990s. From then until today,
massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors became the norm. The US has long been the leader in the supercomputer field, first through Cray's almost uninterrupted dominance of the field, and later through a variety of technology companies. Japan made major strides in the field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in the field. As of May 2022, the fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list is Frontier, in the US, with a
LINPACK benchmark 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 ...
score of 1.102 ExaFlop/s, followed by Fugaku. The US has five of the top 10; China has two; Japan, Finland, and France have one each. In June 2018, all combined supercomputers on the TOP500 list broke the 1  exaFLOPS mark.


History

In 1960,
UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
built the Livermore Atomic Research Computer (LARC), today considered among the first supercomputers, for the US Navy Research and Development Center. It still used high-speed
drum memory Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. For many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory o ...
, rather than the newly emerging disk drive technology. Also, among the first supercomputers was the
IBM 7030 Stretch The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. It was the fastest computer in the world from 1961 until the first CDC 6600 became operational in 1964."Designed by Seymour Cray, the CDC 6600 was almost three ti ...
. The IBM 7030 was built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in 1955 had requested a computer 100 times faster than any existing computer. The IBM 7030 used transistors, magnetic core memory, pipelined instructions, prefetched data through a memory controller and included pioneering random access disk drives. The IBM 7030 was completed in 1961 and despite not meeting the challenge of a hundredfold increase in performance, it was purchased by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Customers in England and France also bought the computer, and it became the basis for the
IBM 7950 Harvest The IBM 7950, also known as Harvest, was a one-of-a-kind adjunct to the Stretch computer which was installed at the United States National Security Agency (NSA). Built by IBM, it was delivered in 1962 and operated until 1976, when it was decommi ...
, a supercomputer built for
cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic sec ...
. The third pioneering supercomputer project in the early 1960s was the
Atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographi ...
at the University of Manchester, built by a team led by Tom Kilburn. He designed the Atlas to have memory space for up to a million words of 48 bits, but because magnetic storage with such a capacity was unaffordable, the actual core memory of the Atlas was only 16,000 words, with a drum providing memory for a further 96,000 words. The Atlas operating system swapped data in the form of pages between the magnetic core and the drum. The Atlas operating system also introduced time-sharing to supercomputing, so that more than one program could be executed on the supercomputer at any one time. Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and the
Manchester University , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Unive ...
and was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. The
CDC 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...
, designed by Seymour Cray, was finished in 1964 and marked the transition from
germanium Germanium is a chemical element with the symbol Ge and atomic number 32. It is lustrous, hard-brittle, grayish-white and similar in appearance to silicon. It is a metalloid in the carbon group that is chemically similar to its group neighbors si ...
to silicon transistors. Silicon transistors could run more quickly and the overheating problem was solved by introducing refrigeration to the supercomputer design. Thus, the CDC6600 became the fastest computer in the world. Given that the 6600 outperformed all the other contemporary computers by about 10 times, it was dubbed a ''supercomputer'' and defined the supercomputing market, when one hundred computers were sold at $8 million each. Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, Cray Research. Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz
Cray-1 The Cray-1 was a supercomputer designed, manufactured and marketed by Cray Research. Announced in 1975, the first Cray-1 system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976. Eventually, over 100 Cray-1s were sold, making it one of the ...
in 1976, which became one of the most successful supercomputers in history.''Readings in computer architecture'' by Mark Donald Hill, Norman Paul Jouppi, Gurindar Sohi 1999 page 41-48''Milestones in computer science and information technology'' by Edwin D. Reilly 2003 page 65 The
Cray-2 The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, ...
was released in 1985. It had eight
central processing unit A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...
s (CPUs), liquid cooling and the electronics coolant liquid Fluorinert was pumped through the supercomputer architecture. It reached 1.9 
gigaFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) 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 meas ...
, making it the first supercomputer to break the gigaflop barrier.


Massively parallel designs

The only computer to seriously challenge the Cray-1's performance in the 1970s was the ILLIAC IV. This machine was the first realized example of a true
massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
computer, in which many processors worked together to solve different parts of a single larger problem. In contrast with the vector systems, which were designed to run a single stream of data as quickly as possible, in this concept, the computer instead feeds separate parts of the data to entirely different processors and then recombines the results. The ILLIAC's design was finalized in 1966 with 256 processors and offer speed up to 1 GFLOPS, compared to the 1970s Cray-1's peak of 250 MFLOPS. However, development problems led to only 64 processors being built, and the system could never operate more quickly than about 200 MFLOPS while being much larger and more complex than the Cray. Another problem was that writing software for the system was difficult, and getting peak performance from it was a matter of serious effort. But the partial success of the ILLIAC IV was widely seen as pointing the way to the future of supercomputing. Cray argued against this, famously quipping that "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" But by the early 1980s, several teams were working on parallel designs with thousands of processors, notably the
Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
(CM) that developed from research at
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
. The CM-1 used as many as 65,536 simplified custom microprocessors connected together in a network to share data. Several updated versions followed; the CM-5 supercomputer is a massively parallel processing computer capable of many billions of arithmetic operations per second. In 1982, Osaka University's LINKS-1 Computer Graphics System used a
massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
processing architecture, with 514 microprocessors, including 257 Zilog Z8001 control processors and 257 iAPX 86/20 floating-point processors. It was mainly used for rendering realistic
3D computer graphics 3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for t ...
. Fujitsu's VPP500 from 1992 is unusual since, to achieve higher speeds, its processors used GaAs, a material normally reserved for microwave applications due to its toxicity.
Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the l ...
's
Numerical Wind Tunnel Numerical Wind Tunnel (数値風洞) was an early implementation of the vector parallel architecture developed in a joint project between National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan and Fujitsu. It was the first supercomputer with a sustained performanc ...
supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7  gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional
crossbar Crossbar may refer to: Structures * Latch (hardware), a post barring a door * Top tube of a bicycle frame * Crossbar, the horizontal member of various sports goals * Crossbar, a horizontal member of an electricity pylon Other * In electronic ...
network. The
Intel Paragon The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by Intel in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental ''Touchstone Delta'' system that was built at Caltech, launched ...
could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two-dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes, communicating via the Message Passing Interface. Software development remained a problem, but the CM series sparked off considerable research into this issue. Similar designs using custom hardware were made by many companies, including the Evans & Sutherland ES-1, MasPar, nCUBE, Intel iPSC and the
Goodyear MPP The Goodyear Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) was a massively parallel processing supercomputer built by Goodyear Aerospace for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It was designed to deliver enormous computational power at lower cost than oth ...
. But by the mid-1990s, general-purpose CPU performance had improved so much in that a supercomputer could be built using them as the individual processing units, instead of using custom chips. By the turn of the 21st century, designs featuring tens of thousands of commodity CPUs were the norm, with later machines adding graphic units to the mix. Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths. In the grid computing approach, the processing power of many computers, organized as distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available. In another approach, many processors are used in proximity to each other, e.g. in a
computer cluster A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The comp ...
. In such a centralized
massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
system the speed and flexibility of the ' becomes very important and modern supercomputers have used various approaches ranging from enhanced Infiniband systems to three-dimensional torus interconnects.Knight, Will:
IBM creates world's most powerful computer
, ''NewScientist.com news service'', June 2007
The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging direction, e.g. as in the Cyclops64 system.''Analysis and performance results of computing betweenness centrality on IBM Cyclops64'' by Guangming Tan, Vugranam C. Sreedhar and Guang R. Gao The Journal of Supercomputing Volume 56, Number 1, 1–24 September 2011 As the price, performance and energy efficiency of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) have improved, a number of
petaFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) 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 meas ...
supercomputers such as
Tianhe-I Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 (, ; '' Sky River Number One'') is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world fro ...
and Nebulae have started to rely on them. However, other systems such as the
K computer The K computer named for the Japanese word/numeral , meaning 10 quadrillion (1016)See Japanese numbers was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Pre ...
continue to use conventional processors such as
SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed i ...
-based designs and the overall applicability of GPGPUs in general-purpose high-performance computing applications has been the subject of debate, in that while a GPGPU may be tuned to score well on specific benchmarks, its overall applicability to everyday algorithms may be limited unless significant effort is spent to tune the application to it. However, GPUs are gaining ground, and in 2012 the Jaguar supercomputer was transformed into
Titan Titan most often refers to: * Titan (moon), the largest moon of Saturn * Titans, a race of deities in Greek mythology Titan or Titans may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Fictional entities Fictional locations * Titan in fiction, fictiona ...
by retrofitting CPUs with GPUs. High-performance computers have an expected life cycle of about three years before requiring an upgrade. The
Gyoukou is a supercomputer developed by and PEZY Computing, based around ExaScaler's ZettaScaler immersion cooling system. It was deployed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) Yokohama Institute for Earth Sciences, t ...
supercomputer is unique in that it uses both a massively parallel design and liquid immersion cooling.


Special purpose supercomputers

A number of special-purpose systems have been designed, dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom ASICs, allowing better price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. Examples of special-purpose supercomputers include Belle,
Deep Blue Deep Blue may refer to: Film * ''Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads'', a 1992 documentary film about Mississippi Delta blues music * Deep Blue (2001 film), ''Deep Blue'' (2001 film), a film by Dwight H. Little * Deep Blue (2003 ...
, and Hydra for playing chess,
Gravity Pipe Gravity Pipe (abbreviated GRAPE) is a project which uses hardware acceleration to perform gravitational computations. Integrated with Beowulf-style commodity computers, the GRAPE system calculates the force of gravity that a given mass, such as ...
for astrophysics, MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure prediction and molecular dynamics, and
Deep Crack In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decr ...
for breaking the
DES Des is a masculine given name, mostly a short form (hypocorism) of Desmond. People named Des include: People * Des Buckingham, English football manager * Des Corcoran, (1928–2004), Australian politician * Des Dillon (disambiguation), sever ...
cipher In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is ''encipherment''. To encipher or encode i ...
.


Energy usage and heat management

Throughout the decades, the management of
heat density Heat flux or thermal flux, sometimes also referred to as ''heat flux density'', heat-flow density or ''heat flow rate intensity'' is a flow of energy per unit area per unit time. In SI its units are watts per square metre (W/m2). It has both a ...
has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers.''The Supermen: Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer'' by Charles J. Murray 1997, , pages 133–135''Parallel Computational Fluid Dyynamics; Recent Advances and Future Directions'' edited by Rupak Biswas 2010 page 401 The large amount of heat generated by a system may also have other effects, e.g. reducing the lifetime of other system components.''Supercomputing Research Advances'' by Yongge Huáng 2008, , pages 313–314 There have been diverse approaches to heat management, from pumping Fluorinert through the system, to a hybrid liquid-air cooling system or air cooling with normal
air conditioning Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling ...
temperatures.''Parallel computing for real-time signal processing and control'' by M. O. Tokhi, Mohammad Alamgir Hossain 2003, , pages 201–202 A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04  megawatts (MW) of electricity. The cost to power and cool the system can be significant, e.g. 4 MW at $0.10/kWh is $400 an hour or about $3.5 million per year. Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices and affects powerful computer systems in various ways. The thermal design power and
CPU power dissipation Processor power dissipation or processing unit power dissipation is the process in which computer processors consume electrical energy, and dissipate this energy in the form of heat due to the resistance in the electronic circuits. Power managem ...
issues in supercomputing surpass those of traditional computer cooling technologies. The supercomputing awards for
green computing Green computing, green IT, or ICT sustainability, is the study and practice of environmentally sustainable computing or IT. The goals of green computing are similar to green chemistry: reduce the use of hazardous materials, maximize energy effic ...
reflect this issue. The packing of thousands of processors together inevitably generates significant amounts of
heat density Heat flux or thermal flux, sometimes also referred to as ''heat flux density'', heat-flow density or ''heat flow rate intensity'' is a flow of energy per unit area per unit time. In SI its units are watts per square metre (W/m2). It has both a ...
that need to be dealt with. The
Cray-2 The Cray-2 is a supercomputer with four vector processors made by Cray Research starting in 1985. At 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, it was the fastest machine in the world when it was released, replacing the Cray X-MP in that spot. It was, ...
was
liquid cooled Liquid cooling refers to cooling by means of the convection or circulation of a liquid. Examples of liquid cooling technologies include: * Cooling by convection or circulation of coolant, including water cooling * Liquid cooling and ventilatio ...
, and used a Fluorinert "cooling waterfall" which was forced through the modules under pressure. However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company.''Computational science – ICCS 2005: 5th international conference'' edited by Vaidy S. Sunderam 2005, , pages 60–67 In the
Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
system, IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density. The IBM Power 775, released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling. The IBM Aquasar system uses hot water cooling to achieve energy efficiency, the water being used to heat buildings as well. The energy efficiency of computer systems is generally measured in terms of " FLOPS per watt". In 2008,
Roadrunner The roadrunners (genus ''Geococcyx''), also known as chaparral birds or chaparral cocks, are two species of fast-running ground cuckoos with long tails and crests. They are found in the southwestern and south-central United States and Mexico, us ...
by IBM operated at 3.76  MFLOPS/W. In November 2010, the Blue Gene/Q reached 1,684 MFLOPS/W and in June 2011 the top two spots on the Green 500 list were occupied by
Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
machines in New York (one achieving 2097 MFLOPS/W) with the DEGIMA cluster in Nagasaki placing third with 1375 MFLOPS/W. Because copper wires can transfer energy into a supercomputer with much higher power densities than forced air or circulating refrigerants can remove
waste heat Waste heat is heat that is produced by a machine, or other process that uses energy, as a byproduct of doing work. All such processes give off some waste heat as a fundamental result of the laws of thermodynamics. Waste heat has lower utility ( ...
, the ability of the cooling systems to remove waste heat is a limiting factor. , many existing supercomputers have more infrastructure capacity than the actual peak demand of the machine designers generally conservatively design the power and cooling infrastructure to handle more than the theoretical peak electrical power consumed by the supercomputer. Designs for future supercomputers are power-limited the thermal design power of the supercomputer as a whole, the amount that the power and cooling infrastructure can handle, is somewhat more than the expected normal power consumption, but less than the theoretical peak power consumption of the electronic hardware.


Software and system management


Operating systems

Since the end of the 20th century,
supercomputer operating systems A supercomputer operating system is an operating system intended for supercomputers. Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as fundamental changes have occurred in supercomputer arc ...
have undergone major transformations, based on the changes in supercomputer architecture.''Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing'' by David Padua 2011 pages 426–429 While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been to move away from in-house operating systems to the adaptation of generic software such as Linux.''Knowing machines: essays on technical change'' by Donald MacKenzie 1998 page 149-151 Since modern
massively parallel Massively parallel is the term for using a large number of computer processors (or separate computers) to simultaneously perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel. GPUs are massively parallel architecture with tens of thousands of th ...
supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes, they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g. using a small and efficient lightweight kernel such as CNK or CNL on compute nodes, but a larger system such as a Linux-derivative on server and I/O nodes.''Euro-Par 2004 Parallel Processing: 10th International Euro-Par Conference'' 2004, by Marco Danelutto, Marco Vanneschi and Domenico Laforenza, , page 835''Euro-Par 2006 Parallel Processing: 12th International Euro-Par Conference'', 2006, by Wolfgang E. Nagel, Wolfgang V. Walter and Wolfgang Lehner page
An Evaluation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Cray XT3
' by Sadaf R. Alam etal ''International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications'' February 2008 vol. 22 no. 1 52–80
While in a traditional multi-user computer system job scheduling is, in effect, a tasking problem for processing and peripheral resources, in a massively parallel system, the job management system needs to manage the allocation of both computational and communication resources, as well as gracefully deal with inevitable hardware failures when tens of thousands of processors are present.Open Job Management Architecture for the Blue Gene/L Supercomputer by Yariv Aridor et al. in ''Job scheduling strategies for parallel processing'' by Dror G. Feitelson 2005 pages 95–101 Although most modern supercomputers use Linux-based operating systems, each manufacturer has its own specific Linux-derivative, and no industry standard exists, partly due to the fact that the differences in hardware architectures require changes to optimize the operating system to each hardware design.


Software tools and message passing

The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as
MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...
and PVM, VTL, and open source software such as
Beowulf ''Beowulf'' (; ang, Bēowulf ) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature. The ...
. In the most common scenario, environments such as PVM and
MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, an emerging non-invasive tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a nuclear medicine procedure that illustrates the function of the hear ...
for loosely connected clusters and
OpenMP OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared-memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on many platforms, instruction-set architectures and operating sy ...
for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are used. Significant effort is required to optimize an algorithm for the interconnect characteristics of the machine it will be run on; the aim is to prevent any of the CPUs from wasting time waiting on data from other nodes. GPGPUs have hundreds of processor cores and are programmed using programming models such as
CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach c ...
or
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-prog ...
. Moreover, it is quite difficult to debug and test parallel programs. Special techniques need to be used for testing and debugging such applications.


Distributed supercomputing


Opportunistic approaches

Opportunistic supercomputing is a form of networked grid computing whereby a "super virtual computer" of many loosely coupled volunteer computing machines performs very large computing tasks. Grid computing has been applied to a number of large-scale embarrassingly parallel problems that require supercomputing performance scales. However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing cannot handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations. The fastest grid computing system is the volunteer computing project
Folding@home Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a volunteer computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements ...
(F@h). , F@h reported 2.5 exaFLOPS of x86 processing power. Of this, over 100 PFLOPS are contributed by clients running on various GPUs, and the rest from various CPU systems. The
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it becam ...
(BOINC) platform hosts a number of volunteer computing projects. , BOINC recorded a processing power of over 166 petaFLOPS through over 762 thousand active Computers (Hosts) on the network. , Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search's (GIMPS) distributed Mersenne Prime search achieved about 0.313 PFLOPS through over 1.3 million computers. Th

supports GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest volunteer computing projects, since 1997.


Quasi-opportunistic approaches

Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing is a form of distributed computing whereby the "super virtual computer" of many networked geographically disperse computers performs computing tasks that demand huge processing power. Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing aims to provide a higher quality of service than opportunistic grid computing by achieving more control over the assignment of tasks to distributed resources and the use of intelligence about the availability and reliability of individual systems within the supercomputing network. However, quasi-opportunistic distributed execution of demanding parallel computing software in grids should be achieved through implementation of grid-wise allocation agreements, co-allocation subsystems, communication topology-aware allocation mechanisms, fault tolerant message passing libraries and data pre-conditioning.


High-performance computing clouds

Cloud computing with its recent and rapid expansions and development have grabbed the attention of high-performance computing (HPC) users and developers in recent years. Cloud computing attempts to provide HPC-as-a-service exactly like other forms of services available in the cloud such as software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service. HPC users may benefit from the cloud in different angles such as scalability, resources being on-demand, fast, and inexpensive. On the other hand, moving HPC applications have a set of challenges too. Good examples of such challenges are virtualization overhead in the cloud, multi-tenancy of resources, and network latency issues. Much research is currently being done to overcome these challenges and make HPC in the cloud a more realistic possibility. In 2016, Penguin Computing, Parallel Works, R-HPC,
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide ...
,
Univa Univa was a software company that developed workload management and cloud management products for compute-intensive applications in the data center and across public, private, and hybrid clouds, before being acquired by Altair Engineering in Septe ...
, Silicon Graphics International, Rescale, Sabalcore, and Gomput started to offer HPC cloud computing. The Penguin On Demand (POD) cloud is a
bare-metal In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system. Modern operating systems evolved through various stages, from elementary to the pre ...
compute model to execute code, but each user is given
virtualized In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...
login node. POD computing nodes are connected via non-virtualized 10 Gbit/s Ethernet or QDR InfiniBand networks. User connectivity to the POD
data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommuni ...
ranges from 50 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s. Citing Amazon's EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, Penguin Computing argues that virtualization of compute nodes is not suitable for HPC. Penguin Computing has also criticized that HPC clouds may have allocated computing nodes to customers that are far apart, causing latency that impairs performance for some HPC applications.


Performance measurement


Capability versus capacity

Supercomputers generally aim for the maximum in capability computing rather than capacity computing. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a single large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can, e.g. a very complex weather simulation application. Capacity computing, in contrast, is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve a few somewhat large problems or many small problems.''The Potential Impact of High-End Capability Computing on Four Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering'' by Committee on the Potential Impact of High-End Computing on Illustrative Fields of Science and Engineering and National Research Council (28 October 2008) page 9 Architectures that lend themselves to supporting many users for routine everyday tasks may have a lot of capacity but are not typically considered supercomputers, given that they do not solve a single very complex problem.


Performance metrics

In general, the speed of supercomputers is measured and benchmarked in FLOPS (floating-point operations per second), and not in terms of MIPS (million instructions per second), as is the case with general-purpose computers. These measurements are commonly used with an
SI prefix The International System of Units, known by the international abbreviation SI in all languages and sometimes pleonastically as the SI system, is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. E ...
such as tera-, combined into the shorthand TFLOPS (1012 FLOPS, pronounced ''teraflops''), or
peta- A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The pre ...
, combined into the shorthand PFLOPS (1015 FLOPS, pronounced ''petaflops''.) Petascale supercomputers can process one quadrillion (1015) (1000 trillion) FLOPS.
Exascale Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second ( exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance. Exascale ...
is computing performance in the exaFLOPS (EFLOPS) range. An EFLOPS is one quintillion (1018) FLOPS (one million TFLOPS). No single number can reflect the overall performance of a computer system, yet the goal of the Linpack benchmark is to approximate how fast the computer solves numerical problems and it is widely used in the industry. The FLOPS measurement is either quoted based on the theoretical floating point performance of a processor (derived from manufacturer's processor specifications and shown as "Rpeak" in the TOP500 lists), which is generally unachievable when running real workloads, or the achievable throughput, derived from the
LINPACK benchmarks 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 ...
and shown as "Rmax" in the TOP500 list. The LINPACK benchmark typically performs LU decomposition of a large matrix. The LINPACK performance gives some indication of performance for some real-world problems, but does not necessarily match the processing requirements of many other supercomputer workloads, which for example may require more memory bandwidth, or may require better integer computing performance, or may need a high performance I/O system to achieve high levels of performance.


The TOP500 list

Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the TOP500 list according to their
LINPACK benchmark 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 ...
results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is a widely cited current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time. This is a recent list of the computers which appeared at the top of the TOP500 list, and the "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. In 2018, Lenovo became the world's largest provider for the TOP500 supercomputers with 117 units produced.


Applications

The stages of supercomputer application may be summarized in the following table: The IBM
Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...
/P computer has been used to simulate a number of artificial neurons equivalent to approximately one percent of a human cerebral cortex, containing 1.6 billion neurons with approximately 9 trillion connections. The same research group also succeeded in using a supercomputer to simulate a number of artificial neurons equivalent to the entirety of a rat's brain. Modern-day weather forecasting also relies on supercomputers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses supercomputers to crunch hundreds of millions of observations to help make weather forecasts more accurate. In 2011, the challenges and difficulties in pushing the envelope in supercomputing were underscored by IBM's abandonment of the
Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authori ...
petascale project. The
Advanced Simulation and Computing Program The Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (or ASC) is a super-computing program run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, in order to simulate, test, and maintain the United States nuclear stockpile. The program was created in 1995 ...
currently uses supercomputers to maintain and simulate the United States nuclear stockpile. In early 2020, COVID-19 was front and center in the world. Supercomputers used different simulations to find compounds that could potentially stop the spread. These computers run for tens of hours using multiple paralleled running CPU's to model different processes.


Development and trends

In the 2010s, China, the United States, the European Union, and others competed to be the first to create a 1 
exaFLOP In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) 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 meas ...
(1018 or one quintillion FLOPS) supercomputer. Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories has theorized that a zettaFLOPS (1021 or one sextillion FLOPS) computer is required to accomplish full weather modeling, which could cover a two-week time span accurately. Such systems might be built around 2030. Many
Monte Carlo simulations Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...
use the same algorithm to process a randomly generated data set; particularly, integro-differential equations describing physical transport processes, the random paths, collisions, and energy and momentum depositions of neutrons, photons, ions, electrons, etc. The next step for microprocessors may be into the
third dimension Three-dimensional space (also: 3D space, 3-space or, rarely, tri-dimensional space) is a geometric setting in which three values (called ''parameters'') are required to determine the position of an element (i.e., point). This is the informal ...
; and specializing to Monte Carlo, the many layers could be identical, simplifying the design and manufacture process. The cost of operating high performance supercomputers has risen, mainly due to increasing power consumption. In the mid-1990s a top 10 supercomputer required in the range of 100 kilowatts, in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required between 1 and 2 megawatts. A 2010 study commissioned by DARPA identified power consumption as the most pervasive challenge in achieving
Exascale computing Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance. Exascale ...
. At the time a megawatt per year in energy consumption cost about 1 million dollars. Supercomputing facilities were constructed to efficiently remove the increasing amount of heat produced by modern multi-core
central processing unit A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...
s. Based on the energy consumption of the Green 500 list of supercomputers between 2007 and 2011, a supercomputer with 1 exaFLOPS in 2011 would have required nearly 500 megawatts. Operating systems were developed for existing hardware to conserve energy whenever possible. CPU cores not in use during the execution of a parallelized application were put into low-power states, producing energy savings for some supercomputing applications. The increasing cost of operating supercomputers has been a driving factor in a trend toward bundling of resources through a distributed supercomputer infrastructure. National supercomputing centers first emerged in the US, followed by Germany and Japan. The European Union launched the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) with the aim of creating a persistent pan-European supercomputer infrastructure with services to support scientists across the European Union in porting, scaling and optimizing supercomputing applications. Iceland built the world's first zero-emission supercomputer. Located at the Thor Data Center in Reykjavík, Iceland, this supercomputer relies on completely renewable sources for its power rather than fossil fuels. The colder climate also reduces the need for active cooling, making it one of the greenest facilities in the world of computers. Funding supercomputer hardware also became increasingly difficult. In the mid-1990s a top 10 supercomputer cost about 10 million euros, while in 2010 the top 10 supercomputers required an investment of between 40 and 50 million euros. In the 2000s national governments put in place different strategies to fund supercomputers. In the UK the national government funded supercomputers entirely and high performance computing was put under the control of a national funding agency. Germany developed a mixed funding model, pooling local state funding and federal funding.


In fiction

Many
science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel univers ...
writers have depicted supercomputers in their works, both before and after the historical construction of such computers. Much of such fiction deals with the relations of humans with the computers they build and with the possibility of conflict eventually developing between them. Examples of supercomputers in fiction include HAL 9000, Multivac,
The Machine Stops "The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in ''The Oxford and Cambridge Review'' (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's ''The Eternal Moment and Other Storie ...
, GLaDOS,
The Evitable Conflict "The Evitable Conflict" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the June 1950 issue of ''Astounding Science Fiction'' and subsequently appeared in the collections ''I, Robot'' (1950), '' The Complet ...
,
Vulcan's Hammer ''Vulcan's Hammer'' is a 1960 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was released originally as an Ace Double. This has been considered to be the final outing of Dick's 1950s style pulp science fiction writing, before his b ...
,
Colossus Colossus, Colossos, or the plural Colossi or Colossuses, may refer to: Statues * Any exceptionally large statue ** List of tallest statues ** :Colossal statues * ''Colossus of Barletta'', a bronze statue of an unidentified Roman emperor * ''Col ...
, WOPR, and Deep Thought.


See also

*
ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference SC (formerly Supercomputing), 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 ...
* ACM SIGHPC * High-performance computing * High-performance technical computing * Jungle computing *
Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer The Tesla Personal Supercomputer is a desktop computer ( personal supercomputer) that is backed by Nvidia and built by various hardware vendors. It is meant to be a demonstration of the capabilities of Nvidia's Tesla GPGPU brand; it utilizes Nvidia ...
* Parallel computing * Supercomputing in China * Supercomputing in Europe * Supercomputing in India * Supercomputing in Japan * Testing high-performance computing applications * Ultra Network Technologies * Quantum computing


References


External links

* McDonnell, Marshall T. (2013
"Supercomputer Design: An Initial Effort to Capture the Environmental, Economic, and Societal Impacts"
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Publications and Other Works. {{Authority control American inventions Cluster computing Concurrent computing Distributed computing architecture Parallel computing