Each supercomputer manufacturer IBM, Cray, Fujitsu usually starts with a Linux distro of choice, and then makes significant changes to tailor the OS to the specific hardware. This is involves a very intricate job of task scheduling and memory management.
The end result is a supercomputer that has tens of thousands of nodes that hopefully act in parallel. The cost of ownership, by the way, is in the hundreds of millions range.
Not only do you have the installation cost, but a supercomputer uses megawatts of power, too. Next page: But what the heck can you do with 88, parallel processors?
Beyond the security and economic aspects, he adds, those who clearly understand the implications of high-performance computing see its huge benefits to science, business and other sectors. On the nuclear armaments front, for example, supercomputers have proven a huge boon to things that go boom. Sophisticated simulations have eliminated the need for real-world testing.
They also simulate what happens to those [weapons] if they are on a shelf for so many years, because they have to verify that the stockpile will work. Department of Defense supercomputing centers — installed four sharable supercomputers on which the entire U. Artificial intelligence is still pretty rudimentary, but supercomputers are changing that by turbo-charging machine learning processes to produce quicker results from more data — as in this climate science research.
As Argonne director Paul Kearns told HPCWire, Aurora is intended for "next generation" AI that will accelerate scientific discovery and make possible improvements in such areas as extreme weather forecasting, medical treatments, brain mapping, the development of new materials.
It will even help us further understanding the universe, he added, "and that is just the beginning. While Dongarra thinks supercomputers will shape the future of AI , exactly how that will happen is isn't entirely foreseeable. AI work is still only a small percentage of what supercomputers do. Hemsoth thinks it will probably be another five years before existing HPC workflows include a lot of AI and deep learning, both of which will have different compute requirements than they presently do.
AI will be a practical part of workloads, but it's going to change. And the actual software and application that stuff needs to run on is going to change, which is going to change what hardware you need to have.
This stuff is evolving rapidly, but with really long hardware production cycles — especially if you're a national lab and have to procure this stuff three to five years before you ever even get the machine. Another brain blaster: your current smartphone is as fast as a supercomputer was in — one that had 1, processors and did nuclear simulations.
Is there an app for that? The point is, this stuff is speedy — and it's only getting speedier. Here's how Dongarra nutshells it:. That was 10 12 teraflops. Then, in , we reached petaflops — 10 15 — at Los Alamos. In probably 10 or 11 years, we are going to be at zettascale — 10 21 operations per second.
When I started in computing, we were doing megaflops — 10 6 operations. So things change. There are changes in architecture, changes in software and applications that have to move along with that.
Going to the next level is a natural progression. A recent story on TOP Or so he hopes. What is a supercomputer? We go inside Argonne National Laboratory to find out. Mike Thomas. May 23, Updated: April 8, You might be surprised to find out that even with the ubiquitous nature of the personal PC and network systems, supercomputers are still used in a variety of operations.
In the next few pages, we'll give you the skinny on what supercomputers are and how they still function in several industrial and scientific areas. First, a little background. What makes a supercomputer so extraordinary?
Well, the definition is a bit hard to pin down. Essentially, a supercomputer is any computer that's one of the most powerful, fastest systems in the world at any given point in time. As technology progresses, supercomputers must up the ante as well. For instance, the first supercomputer was the aptly named Colossus, housed in Britain.
It was designed to read messages and crack the German code during the second World War, and it could read up to 5, characters a second. Sounds impressive, right? Not to denigrate the Colossus' hard work, but compare that to the NASA Columbia supercomputer that completes 42 and a half trillion operations per second. In other words, what used to be a supercomputer now could qualify as a satisfactory calculator , and what we currently call supercomputers are as advanced as any computer can get. There are, however, a few things that make a computer branch into "super" territory.
It will usually have more than one central processing unit CPU , which allows the computer to do faster circuit switching and accomplish more tasks at once. Because of this, a supercomputer will also have an enormous amount of storage so that it can access many tasks at a time.
It will also have the capability to do vector arithmetic, which means that it can calculate multiple lists of operations instead of just one at a time. As we said, supercomputers were originally developed for code cracking, as well as ballistics. They were designed to make an enormous amount of calculations at a time, which was a big improvement over, say, 20 mathematics graduate students in a room, hand-scratching operations.
In some ways, supercomputers are still used for those ends. In , the National Nuclear Security Administration and Purdue University began using a network of supercomputers to simulate nuclear weapons capability. A whopping , machines are used for the testing [source: Appro ]. But it's not just the military that's using supercomputers anymore. Whenever you check the weather app on your phone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA is using a supercomputer called the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System to forecast weather, predict weather events, and track space and oceanic weather activity as well [source: IBM ].
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