Wednesday 15 January 2014

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SUPERCOMPUTERS


**FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER OF THE WORLD**:

TIANHE-2,CHINESE SUPERCOMPUTER


A Chinese university has built the world's fastest supercomputer, almost doubling the speed of the U.S. machine that previously claimed the top spot and underlining China's rise as a science and technology powerhouse.

 

FEATURES

 

->Developed by the National University of Defense Technology in central China's Changsha city. It is capable of sustained computing of 33.86 petaflops per second.

   That's the equivalent of 33,860 trillion calculations per second

 

->The Tianhe-2, which means Milky Way-2, knocks the U.S. Energy Department's Titan machine off the No. 1 spot. It achieved 17.59 petaflops per second.

 

->SOLVES COMPLEX PROBLEMS


 Examples:

    a.modeling weather systems

     b.simulating nuclear explosions

     c.designing jetliners

     d.government security applications      (wow........)

 

->INTEL IS EVERGREEN

Uses Intel for the main computing part.

"Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part," TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra, who toured the Tianhe-2 facility in May, said in a news release. "That is, the interconnect, operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese."

 

->CHINA- A SUPERCOMPUTING POWER

This computer has made China a recognized supercomputing power leaving everybody behind..

 

->HUGE EFFORT

 It was developed by a team of 1300 scientists and engineers("such a huge effort").

 

 

IMP FACT

 

 In computing, FLOPS (for FLoating-point Operations Per Second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than the generic instructions per second.

 

 HARDWARE

 

1.    PROCESSORS

With 16,000 computer nodes, each comprising two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi chips, it represents the world's largest

  installation of Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips,counting a total of 3,120,000 cores.

 

2.    MEMORY

Each of the 16,000 nodes possess 88 gigabytes of memory.

The total CPU plus coprocessor memory is 1,375 TiB.

 

3.    POWER

 The system itself would draw 17.6 megawatts of power and including external cooling,

   the system would draw an aggregate of 24 megawatts.

 

4.    SPACE

 The computer complex would occupy 720 square meters of space.

 

ARE THE TOOLS WHICH MEASURE THE PERFORMANCE OF SUPERCOMPUTERS FULLY RELIABLE?

 

A team, led by a professor from Germany's University of Mannheim, compiles the Top500 list bi-yearly and the latest list of five fastest supercomputers remaind unchanged compared to the list released in June.

 

Per the Linpack benchmark test, Intel-powered Tianhe-2 is able to operate at 33.86 petaflop/sec, which is equivalent to 33,863 trillion calculations per second. Its closest competitors were Cray Inc's Titan with 17.59 petaflop/sec and IBM's Sequoia with 17.17 petaflop/sec.

 

The only change near the top was Switzerland's new Piz Daint supercomputer, which made it to the sixth spot with 6.27 petaflop/sec.

 

The Linpack benchmark test measures how quickly computers can crack a special type of linear equation to determine its speed. However, the benchmark does not take into consideration factors like the speed with which data can be transferred from one area of the system to another. This factor can influence the real world performance of the device.

 

"A very simple benchmark, like the Linpack, cannot reflect the reality of how many real application perform on today's complex computer systems," said Erich Strohmaier. More representative benchmarks have to be much more complex in their coding, their execution and how many aspects of their performance need to be recorded and published. This makes understanding their behaviour more difficult."

IBM created five out of the 10 fastest supercomputers and its head of the computational sciences department at IBM's Zurich research lab, Dr Alessandro Curioni, said that the manner in which the list was calculated needed to be updated. He would voice the same concern at a conference in Denver, Colorado, which will be held this week.

 

"The Top500 has been a very useful tool in the past decades to try to have a single number that could be used to measure the performance and the evolution of high-performance computing," notes Dr Curioni,. "[But] today we need a more practical measurement that reflects the real use of these supercomputers based on their most important applications."

 

Tianhe-2 has been developed by China's National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) and has been set up in National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou.

DO WATCH THIS VIDEO AND ENTER THE WORLD OF SUPERCOMPUTERS :

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebPoYbCz-U

 

ARE PURPOSE BUILT SUPERCOMPUTERS ENERGY SUSTAINABLE?

Read This

http://www.vertatique.com/are-purpose-built-supercomputers-more-sustainable

 

BY SUNCHIT DUDEJA AND UJJWAL RELAN

 

2 comments:

  1. Factors like energy sustainability , internal memory speed, disks, and external networks should be considered while ranking supercomputers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sir,
    i want to use super computer for mu business. My email : rahmanmizanur777@yahoo.com
    I want to use wireless telecommunication, data center and all other purpose.
    Thanks.
    Mizanur rahman.

    ReplyDelete