Who wouldn’t want to be able to choose, among a bunch of supercomputers, one to take home with them? Or am I wrong? Of course, prepare the electricity bill, because the expense is going to be astronomical.
According to his name, it is possible that many users conceive the supercomputer in a wrong way, like a personal computer with the highest performance, for example. However, this is by no means half accurate.
Do you want to know what a supercomputer is? We are going to see it here today, knowing all its history, its main characteristics and, of course, the uses that are given to it. In addition, to finish surprising you, we are going to leave you with a top of the most powerful supercomputers that currently exist, so that you can know their amazing real performance.
What are Supercomputers in computing? Definition
Supercomputer is that computer equipment that has a very high calculation capacity, is designed for a specific purpose and has a design that is really large..
To achieve this, what is done is to form a system of several very powerful computerswhich are part of the same structure and, therefore, are linked together, so that both power and performance are multiplied. Currently these systems are also referred to as computers or high-performance computing environments.
Although they are large devices and with a certain complexity, the truth is that what is sought from them is that they work with a good number of floating operations per second, for which there is a concept, the . This measures, as we say, the number of operations that the machine is capable of doing and corresponds to a performance measurement unit.
History
This kind of computers are introduced “on the market” in the 70s. Most of them appeared thanks Seymour Cray, a dominant company at the time that was responsible for its design and manufacture. At first they were nothing more than full-speed scalar processors.
The next step is given by the competitiveness with the minicomputers. This consisted of the inclusion of some vector processors working in parallelbetween 4 and 16. This is how they began to lower their price and improve, expanding the number and type of users who used them.
Evolution
It is from here that we begin to see changes to consider in the teams. From the vector ones we went to the massively parallel processor systems with common CPUs counted by thousands.
Later, when the microprocessor was adequately developed and tested, it was replace the processor with this, considerably reducing the number of parts to be used in the design of each supercomputer. During the last decades, the microprocessor-server.
Thus, we have that at present the concept of supercomputer is maintained in terms of function and power, but both its appearance and the type and number of parts used have been considerably modified, giving clusters of highly tuned computing devices that work with high-capacity conventional processorsof thousands and even millions of nuclei, that are combinedyes, with interconnections of a special nature.
What are they for and what are the uses of Supercomputers?
Since their birth, supercomputers have had very specific goals. Sand are designed to perform computational operations in massive volume in very short periods of time (millions per second).
That is the basic function that all of them have, although, the purpose can be very different. For example, we would talk about weather predictions, quantum physics problems, physical, space and nuclear simulations, research on climate change, research on the biological processes of the human body and their implications for diseases and to work on problems that are yet to be solved. …
A) Yes, The main users of these machines are large corporations and organizations such as academics, government, military andin some cases, business for huge multinational corporations.
What main characteristics does this type of supercomputer present?
Supercomputers, as we have mentioned, have all kinds of bits and pieces. Although, what characterizes them the most would be:
- Processor. Processing speed is key to getting millions and millions of operations done per second. For this, in addition to a particularly efficient model, a very large number of nuclei is required.
- RAM. In line with the above, you need to have a spectacular RAM memory, of several Tebibytes.
- Cooling system. Cooling systems are essential to combat the very high temperatures that occur in the system. To get an idea, some processors are capable of dissipating, for 10, the heat of a stove disk.
- interconnection capacity. It is necessary that, in large environments, the connection of thousands of users can be given at the same time.
Other characteristics that we can define of these machines is that they lack the capacity for social penetration (there is no interest), that they are very difficult to use, so much so that only specialized personnel can do it, that their size is enormous, that they have achieved many milestones of a social nature, especially in research, and that there are fewer than a thousand around the world and that do not require peripherals.
The 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world
After having told you about the incredible specifications of this type of equipment, we could not end without telling you which have been the most powerful supercomputers ever made.
Shaheen II
It was built by Cry.Inc together with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which it now owns. It has been in use since 2015 in these facilities.
With a Linux OS, Cray, it is impossible not to be surprised to learn that it has almost 200000 cores in your processorwhich is, by the way, the Xeon E5-2698v3 16C. This forces a performance of 5537 TFLOP/s. More surprising is to know its power requirement, which is “only” 2800 KW.
Hazel Hen
Cray.Inc is in charge of the design and manufacture, in 2015, of Hazel Hen, a 41-cabin supercomputer with the Xeon E5-2680v3 12C 185088 cores. Its performance is 7.42 PetaFLOPS/s. The operating system is the same as in the previous case. In this case we have that, although the average power is unknown, it is quite efficient, with a maximum known figure of 1512 KW.
Piz Daint
Cray.Inc is also in charge of this manufacturing that goes directly to Switzerland, where it has been since 2013, specifically at the National Supercomputing Center. To this day it is the best supercomputer on the continent.
It achieves this thanks to its processor Xeon E5-2670 8C which works at 2.6 GHz and 115984 coresits 28 cabins and a theoretical performance of 7.8 petaFLOPS that we have seen double, having already reached 19.6 petaFLOPS. We repeat SO.
Trinity
It is used by both the US Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it is currently located.
We repeat manufacturer and operating system and we find a Xeon E5-2698v3 16C @ 2.3 GHz featuring over 380,000 cores. The processing it achieves is superior to 27000 TFLOPS/s Theoretical. Its memory is 365056 GB.
tianhe-2
We found it in China, in the Supercomputing Center. Its manufacturer was NUDT and it started working in Guangzhou in 2013.
Its OS is Kylin Linux, the processor is a Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2 GHz 3.12 million cores. It is capable, thus, of yielding to 33.86 TFlop/sworking at 17808 kW.
Sunway TaihuLight
We end the list with another supercomputer located in China, in the Supercomputing Center located in Wuxi. The manufacture, in this case, came from the hand of NRCPC and started operating very recently, in 2016.
Its operating system is exclusive, Sunway RaiseOS 2.0.5, which is based on Linux. It has more than 10 million cores in its Sunway SW26010 260C processor at 1.45 GHz. We get a performance of 93 TFlops at 15371 kW.
K Computer
Another great machine, this time Japanese, which works with a SPARC64 VIIfx at 2 GHz that has 700000 cores. The performance it offers reaches 10.5 TFLOPs per second. In return, the energy power amounts to 12659 KW. The OS is Linux. We have it at the RIKEN Advanced Computing Science Center.
sequoia
IBM was in charge of manufacturing this device in 2012, specific and exclusive for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the United States, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Your processor is a One and a half million core Power BQC 16C as well as a performance of more than 17 TFlop/s. Work with Linux. Its consumption power is 7890 kW.
Titan
It performs at a rate of 17.59 petaflops thanks to its Opteron 6274 16C at 2.2 GHz with more than half a million cores. It has Cray Linux Environment and an Nvidia GPU. It is manufactured by Cray.Inc and we found it at the Oak Ridgem National Laboratory in the United States.
Look
It was manufactured by IBM in 2012 and since then it has been located at the Argonne National Laboratory. The processor, in this case, is a Power BQC 16C with a staggering almost 800,000 cores. Performance exceeds every second 8586 TFLOPS/s. It has Linux and works at 3945 KW.
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