Supercomputers

Supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in the process of capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the beginning of its introduction. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s, designed by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), led the market in the 1970s until Cray quit to form his own company, Cray Research.

He then took the supercomputer market with its design, the overall leader in supercomputing for 25 years (1965-1990). In the 1980s several small competitors entering the market, which along with the creation of the minicomputer in the previous decade. Today, the supercomputer market is held by IBM and HP, although Cray Inc.. still specialize in the manufacture of supercomputers.

Use

Supercomputers are used for computation-intensive tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research (including research global warming, molecular modeling, physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion research), analisikrip, etc.. Military and science agency one of the major users of supercomputers.

Design

Supercomputers typically excel in kecepataan of ordinary computers by using an innovative design that makes them able to perform many tasks in parallel, and also details of a complicated civil. This computer is usually specialize to a particular penghitungn, usually counting numbers, and the task is generally not a good result. Memory hierarchy are carefully designed to ensure the processor continue to receive data and instructions at any time: in fact, the difference in performance with ordinary computers located in the memory hierarchy and its components. System I / Onya also designed in order to support high bandwidth.

As with the parallel system in general, Amdahl's law applies, and supercomputer is designed to eliminate the serialization software, and use hardware to speed up the neck of the bottle.

The fastest supercomputer
March 25, 2005 - BlueGene / L made by IBM at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA has 32,768 pieces of computing processors are capable of reaching speeds of 135.5 TFLOPS.
October 27, 2005 - BlueGene / L has reached a speed of 280.6 TFLOPS of computing.
October 27, 2005 - BlueGene / L reached 280.6 TFLOPS of computing speed.
June 2008 - IBM's Roadrunner to reach speeds of 1.026 petaflop

As of November 2005, 61% of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the United States followed by Britain (8.2%), German (4.8%), Japan (4.2%), People's Republic of China (3.4%) , Australia (2.2%), Israel (1.8%), French (1.6%), South Korea (1.4%), Italian (1.2%) and Canada (1.2%).

43.8% of the 500 fastest supercomputers are made by IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard (33.8%), Cray (3.6%), SGI (3.6%), Dell (3.4%), Linux Network (3.2%), NEC (1.2%), Atipa Technology (1%), homemade (1%) and Hitachi (1%).

Processor giant Intel still leads the world with the Intel IA-32 which used 41.2% of the 500 fastest supercomputers was followed by Intel EM64T (16.2%), Power (14.6%), AMD x86-64 (11%) , Intel IA-64 (9.2%), PA-RISC (3.4%) and Cray (1.6%).

A total of 72.2% of the 500 supercomputers use Linux operating system, the rest using AIX (8.8%), HP-UNIX (6.2%), CNK / Linux (3.6%), UNICOS (2.8% ), MacOS X (1%) and SuSE Linux 9 (1%).

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