Supercomputers superior in speed than computers in ordinary houses by using innovative design-shaped cabinets that make them able to perform multiple tasks in parallel, and also details to the civil complex. This computer is usually devoted to a particular computation, usually numerical computation, and it isn’t good results in a common task.
Supercomputer Designed
Memories hierarchies are carefully designed to ensure the processor still receives data and instructions at any time; in fact, the difference in performance with a regular computer located in the memory hierarchy and its components. Its I/O System is also designed to be able to support a wide bandwidth.
By the parallel system in general, Amdahl’s law applies, and supercomputer designed to eliminate weaknesses series arrangement, and the use of parallel systems hardware to accelerate from weakness narrow bandwidth.
Supercomputers are used for calculation-intensive tasks such as; weather forecasting, climate research (including global warming research, molecular modeling, physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion research), script analysis, and so on others. the Military and the Science Agencies one of the main users of supercomputers.
“Tianhe-2” the China Supercomputer
Until this year, ‘Tianhe-2’ or in English called the ‘Milky Way-2’ is still listed as the most intelligent computer on earth. How to imagine that this computer was built to take up to 1.300 Scientists and Engineers.
This Computer belongs to the Chinese Government which is also made by a leading University in China that has the ‘brain’ or the number of CPU cores that will make you surprised, amounted to 3.12 million cores. If it compares with a home computer that has a maximum of 7 or 8 core only.
With 16,000 computer nodes, each composed of two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor chips, the ‘Tianhe-2’ is almost twice as fast as the second computer on the list, that is the United States ‘Cray Titan’. And while the US still has the most computers on the TOP500 list with 233, that number is 32 fewer than it had on the previous list. Meanwhile, China now has 76 computers on the list, 13 more than last time.
The Specs Components of “Tianhe-2”
One look at the specs and you can see why the Tianhe-2 is at the top of the list:
- Cores : 3,120,000
- Linpack Performance (Rmax) : 33,862.7 TFlop/s
- Theoretical Peak (Rpeak) : 54,902.4 TFlop/s
- Power : 17,808.00 kW
- Memory : 1,024,000 GB
- Interconnect : TH Express-2
- Operating System : Kylin Linux
- Compiler : icc
- Math Library : Intel MKL-11.0.0
- MPI : MPICH2 with a customized GLEX Channel
By a lot of the cores, the “Tianhe-2” can perform calculations of data up to 33 860 trillion times per second. Tech Radar reported that the one-hour calculation of Tianhe-2 is 1000 years predicted calculation performed by all the Chinese that exist today.
Also, it is so powerful that it required a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers from China’s National University of Defense Technology to build that Superfast Computer. Sponsored by the “People’s Republic of China’s” High-Tech Development Plan, this computer was built on the premise that China could one day become independent of financial obligations for foreign technologies.
The computer is so powerful, that it can perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second. One hour of these calculations by the machine is the equivalent of 1,000 years of difficult sums by 1.3 billion people – ironically, the current population in China.
Variety of Strategic Purposes
Chinese Government funded project hopes for when the “Tianhe-2” supercomputer can make the Bamboo Curtain country no longer dependent on foreign technology. According to the University Of Defense Technology Of China, “Tianhe-2” is used to develop cybersecurity applications owned by the Government of China.
However, many predict that China will use more of it. Given the current supercomputers in the world used for a variety of strategic purposes.
China’s growth in computer technology is impressive. While the ‘Tianhe-2’ is the only Chinese computer ranked in the top 10, the Asian nation now has nearly as many computers as the UK (30), France (27), and Germany (23) combined. And while there seems to be a slowing trend in performance growth from all nations, China is one of two nations (the other being Japan) that is growing. But, does this mean China could become financially independent from foreign technologies? Not quite!
According to a press release issued by the TOP500, “Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (85.4 percent) of TOP500 systems.” Couple this with the fact that HP has the lead in systems with 182 (36 percent) and IBM is in second place with 176 (35 percent), and it becomes apparent that American companies are paving the future of computer technologies. However, because supercomputers have become so powerful, it has been a hindrance to the overall growth in computer system performance.
“Sequoia” the US Supercomputer
The “NNSA-National Nuclear Security Administration” (National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of the United States) appoints Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a developer for two new supercomputers which are “Sequoia” and “Dawn”, and IBM as a designer and builder of the supercomputer. This new technology allows for the simulation of weapons testing needs intelligently to avoid direct testing.
In cooperation agreement, said “Sequoia” will use future technology called IBM BlueGene Technology, with the ability to reach more than 20 petaflops (20 thousand trillion calculations per second), which is planned to be delivered in 2011 and distributed to operational in last 2012.
Here following the fourth of “Sequoia” prospective for the future technology in computer:
- Sequoia will be a major step in the advancement of technology in computer calculation capabilities. With speeds reaching 20 petaflop sequoia will work 15 times faster than existing supercomputers in his time.
- Sequoia will be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the nuclear weapons stockpile US national. It is also possible to be used to study astronomy, energy, the human genome, and climate change.
- Sequoia will be based on the technology of the future IBM BlueGene technology that uses 1.6 million IBM POWER processors and 1.6 petabytes of memory, which is stored in a refrigerator-sized rack 3422 96 square meters. Sequoia will take advantage of the use of advanced optical fiber at all levels.
- Sequoia will use the Linux Operating System.
“K Computer” Japanese Supercomputer
Three of the fastest supercomputers of the 500 fastest computers in the world in the last June 2011 are:
“K Computer”. Super-computer is taken from the Japanese word “Kei” which means 10 quadrillions and manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe University, Japan. Supercomputers are used for research in fields related to disaster prevention, climate change, and meteorology.
Here are the specifications:
- Manufacturer: Fujitsu
- Cores: 705.024
- Performance Linpack (Rmax): 10,510.0 TFlop/s
- Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 11,280.4 TFlop / s
- Power: 12,659.89 kW
- Memory: GB 1,410,048
- Interconnect: Custom Interconnect
- Operating System: Linux
“Tianhe-IA” the China Supercomputer
“Tianhe-1” was developed by the ‘National University of Defense Technology” (NUDT) in Changsha, Hunan. This supercomputer installed at the National Supercomputing Center, Tianjin, and it is used to perform the calculations for Petroleum exploration and Aircraft Design.
Here is the specifications:
- Cores: 186 368,
- Performance Linpack (Rmax): 2,566.0 TFlop/s
- Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 4,701.0 TFlop / s
- Power: 4,040.00 kW
- Memory: 229.376 GB
- Interconnect: Proprietary
- Operating System: Linux
- Compiler: ICC
“Titan” the US Supercomputer
“Titan” or “Cray Jaguar” is built by the Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. ‘Titan” is an upgrade of the “Jaguar” supercomputer at Oak Ridge earlier that uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) in addition to a conventional central processing unit (CPU). This is the first hybrid to perform more than 10 petaFLOPS.
Titan will use tremendous computing power to study alternative and energy-saving, efficient engines, climate change, and identify new materials.
Here is the “Titan” specifications:
- Manufacturer: Cray Inc.
- Cores: 560.640
- Performance Linpack (Rmax): 17,590.0 TFlop/s
- Theoretical Peak (Rpeak): 27,112.5 TFlop/s
- Power: 8,209.00 kW
- Memory: 710.144 GB
- Interconnect: Cray Gemini interconnect
- Operating system: Cray Linux Environment
Based on the various references that in last November 2005, 61% of the 500 fastest supercomputers are in the United States followed by the United Kingdom (8.2%), Germany (4.8%), Japan (4.2%), the People’s Republic of China (3.4%), Australia (2.2%), Israel (1.8%), France (1.6%), South Korea (1.4%), Italy (1.2%) and Canada (1.2%). 43.8% of the 500 fastest supercomputers are made by IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard (33.8%), Cray (3.6%), SGI (3.6%), Dell (3.4%), Linux Network (3.2%), NEC (1.2%), Atipa Technology (1%), homemade (1%) and Hitachi (1%).
Finally, the giant Intel Processor still leads the world with the Intel IA-32 processors are used 41.2% of the 500 fastest supercomputers is followed by Intel EM64T (16.2%), Power (14.6%), AMD x86-64 (11%), Intel IA-64 (9.2%), PA-RISC (3.4%) and Cray (1.6%).
NOTES:
1) FLOPS is an abbreviation of the term in English “Floating-point Operations Per Second” which refers to the unit for the amount of computation that can be performed by a computing device (in this case the computer) to fractions (floating point) per unit time. FLOPS is a unit of measurement of the speed of the performance of a microprocessor is usually in a scientific application (scientific applications), such as to calculate/simulate the movement data of the Earth in real-time. For example, the Cray 1 supercomputer can perform calculations as many as 80 million calculations of the fractions in 1 second and can be expressed in units of 80 MFLOPS/megaflops.
The Unit of FLOPS are following:
- n = 15petaflops
- Symbol= PFLOPS
- Numerical= 10^15
- Numerous Equivalent= 1.000.000.000.000.000
2) ICT (Information Communication and Technology) is an important aspect of a process, includes two aspects in it, namely Technology Information and Communication Technology. Information technology is as described above. whereas communication technology is any technology that can help people to communicate with each other. So the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a combination of Information Technology and Communication Technology.
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