Supercomputer ... Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion)...
Microarchitecture ... The microarchitecture of a machine is usually represented as (more or less detailed) diagrams that describe the interconnections of the various microarchitectural elements of the machine, which may be everything from single gates and registers, to complete arithmetic logic units (ALU) and even larger elements. These diagrams generally separate the datapath (where data is placed) and the control path (which can be said to steer the data)...
Petascale Computing ... Petascale can also refer to very large storage systems where the capacity exceeds one petabyte (PB). Applications Petascale computing will be used to do advanced computations in fields such as weather and climate simulation, nuclear simulations, cosmology, quantum chemistry, lower-level organism brain simulation, and fusion science...
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ... LLNL is home to many unique facilities and a number of the most powerful computer systems in the world, according to the TOP500 list, including Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest computer from 2004 until Los Alamos National Laboratory's IBM Roadrunner supercomputer surpassed it in 2008. The Lab is a leader in technical innovation: since 1978, LLNL has received a total of 118 prestigious R& D 100 Awards, including five in 2007...
Massively Parallel ... Supercomputers Nearly all supercomputers as of 2005 are massively parallel, with the largest having several hundred thousand CPUs...
Vector Processor ... Vector processors first appeared in the 1970s, and formed the basis of most supercomputers through the 1980s and into the 1990s...
Supercomputer Architecture ... While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm... Supercomputers of the 21st century can use over 100,000 processors (some being graphic units) connected by fast connections... Throughout the decades, the management of heat density has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers...
Grid Computing ... Grid size can vary by a considerable amount. Grids are a form of distributed computing whereby a “super virtual computer” is composed of many networked loosely coupled computers acting together to perform very large tasks...
History Of Computer Clusters ... The formal engineering basis of cluster computing as a means of doing parallel work of any sort was arguably invented by Gene Amdahl of IBM, who in 1967 published what has come to be regarded as the seminal paper on parallel processing: Amdahl's Law. Amdahl's Law describes mathematically the speedup one can expect from parallelizing any given otherwise serially performed task on a parallel architecture...
Parallel Computing ... Parallel computers can be roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware supports parallelism, with multi-core and multi-processor computers having multiple processing elements within a single machine, while clusters, MPPs, and grids use multiple computers to work on the same task. Specialized parallel computer architectures are sometimes used alongside traditional processors, for accelerating specific tasks...
Computer Cluster ... The components of a cluster are usually connected to each other through fast local area networks, each node running its own instance on an operating system. Computer clusters emerged as a result of convergence of a number of computing trends including the availability of low cost microprocessors, high speed networks, and software for high performance distributed computing...
Supercomputer Operating Systems ... Given that modern massively parallel supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes, they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g...
History Of Supercomputing ... In the 1970s, Cray formed his own company and using new approaches to machine architecture produced supercomputers which dominated the field until the end of the 1980s... While the supercomputers of the 1980s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear both in the United States and in Japan, setting new computational performance records...
SIMD ... The first era of modern SIMD machines was characterized by massively parallel processing-style supercomputers such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-2...
Reduced Instruction Set Computing ... Various suggestions have been made regarding a precise definition of RISC, but the general concept is that of a system that uses a small, highly-optimized set of instructions, rather than a more specialized set of instructions often found in other types of architectures. RISC systems use the load/store architecture...
Linux ... It is a leading operating system on servers and other big iron systems such as mainframe computers and supercomputers: more than 90% of today's top 500 supercomputers run some variant of Linux, including the 10 fastest...
Science And Technology In Iran ... Iran is an example of a country that has made considerable advances through education and training, despite international sanctions in almost all aspects of research during the past 30 years. Iran's university population swelled from 100,000 in 1979 to 2 million in 2006...
GPGPU ... The programmability of the pipelines have trended according to Microsoft’s DirectX specification, with DirectX 8 introducing Shader Model 1.1, DirectX 8.1 Pixel Shader Models 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4, and DirectX 9 defining Shader Model 2.x and 3.0. Each shader model increased the programming model flexibilities and capabilities, ensuring the conforming hardware follows suit...
TOP500 ... Name – Some supercomputers are unique, at least on its location, and are therefore christened by its owner...
Linux Adoption ... Many factors have resulted in increased use of Linux systems by traditional desktop users as well as operators of server systems, including desire for decreased operating system cost, increased security and support for open-source principles. Several national governments have passed policies moving governmental computers to Linux from proprietary systems in the last few years...