About super computer ..

Supercomputer

This paper is intended for people interested in High Performance Computing (HPC) in general, in the

performance development of HPC systems from the beginning in the 1970s and, above all, in HPC

applications in the past, today and tomorrow. Readers do not need to be supercomputer experts.

In wise GEEK , a supercomputer is defined as follows:

 A supercomputer is a computer which performs at a rate of speed which is far above that of other computers. Given the constantly changing world of computing, it should come as no surprise to learn that most supercomputers bear their superlative titles for a few years, at best. Computer programmers are fond of saying that today's supercomputer will become tomorrow's workstation.

To give an example:

In 1986, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was the famous Cray2,

available for roughly US$ 22 million at that time. Last year, Apple released their iPad2 tablet

computer, the performance of which is two-thirds of the Cray2’s, but the price of which is only US$

500. This means that, in 25 years, the price has gone down by a factor of 44,000, so today’s

supercomputer is tomorrow’s (tablet) computer.

The father of supercomputers is "Seymour Cray " former chief designer at Control Data Corporation

(CDC). In the 1960s, he had already developed powerful mainframe computers like the CDC

6600/7600. In 1972, Seymour Cray left CDC and founded his own (supercomputer) company, Cray

Research. The first product was the Cray1, the very first supercomputer in the world; the first system

was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S.

In this paper, we will first discuss the TOP500 supercomputer project, which was launched at the

University of Mannheim, Germany, in 1993; it is the only project in the world that has been

successfully tracking and evaluating the supercomputer market for 20 years. Two TOP500 lists are

published per year, one at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany in June and one

at the SC Conference in the U.S. in November. This paper will focus on the results of the 39th

TOP500  list published in June 2012. In chapter 3, we will present six examples of HPC applications in science and industry. After looking at new alternative performance metrics, we will discuss briefly the future of supercomputing at the end of this paper.

From 1986 through 1992, Hans Werner Meuer presented the Mannheim supercomputer statistics at

the opening session of the Supercomputer Seminars at Mannheim University. In 2001, these

Seminars were renamed the ‘International Supercomputing Conference – ISC’. We noticed an

increasing interest in these statistics from year to year. In 1992, we released the last Mannheim

statistics, with 530 installed supercomputers worldwide. The statistics simply counted the vector

computers installed in the U.S., Japan and Europe, since a supercomputer was synonymous with a

vector supercomputer at that time. The statistics of 1986-1992 are listed . Cray Research was

the clear leader, with a constant share of 60%. The U.S. led clearly in 1986 with a share of 50%, but

this dropped to 35% in 1992. In Japan, the development was the other way around. Japan started

with a share of about 20% in 1986 and went up to 40% in 1992, thus surpassing the U.S. At this time,

there was a lot of concern in the U.S. about the ‚Japanese supercomputer danger’.

At the beginning of the 1990s, statistics based merely on the name of the manufacturer were no

longer useful, though. New statistics were required to reflect the diversification of supercomputers,

4 the enormous performance differences between low-end and high-end models, the increasing

availability of massively parallel processing (MPP) systems, and the strong increase in the computing 

power of the high-end models of workstation suppliers; symmetric multiprocessor (SMP).

To provide a new statistical foundation, in 1993 we decided to assemble and maintain a list of the

500 most powerful computer systems in the world. Since 1993, our list has been compiled twice a

year with the help of high performance computer experts, computational scientists, manufacturers,

and the Internet community in general.

In the present list, which is called the TOP500, we publish computers ranked by their performance on

the LIN PACK benchmark. The main objective of the TOP500 list is to provide a ranking of general

purpose systems that are in common use for high-end applications.