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Posted: Oct 27 2010 01:56 pm

I recall years ago, while we were playing games like Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on our Commodore 64's, you would hear about so-called super computers being used by the government, the military, top scientific programs, etc. I'd have to think a "super computer" in 1987 was probably less powerful than an Ipod.

Do super computers still exist? Does NASA have computers with like 500GB of RAM that make our PC's and Laptops look like crap?

UsaSatsui's Youtube Channel · Posted: Oct 27 2010 02:25 pm

Yep. Progress marches on for really fast computers too. The fastest supercomputer can supposedly run at 1.759 PetaFLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second, Peta- is 1 quadrillion).

I wish I could find a comparison for a personal computer, but I can't. I can say the fastest supercomputer in 1987 was at about 3.9 GigaFLOPS, and a calculator today runs at about 10 FLOPS.

Posted: Oct 27 2010 02:55 pm

Yes supercomputer still exist, and yes they still wipe the floor with anything you could get for home.

However they are no longer top secret hardware, with superchips that cost millions of dollars. Now, they are mostly made of clusters of market level hardware.

As of June 2010, here are the top 5 Supercomputers in the world:

1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray XT5 "Jaguar" - USA
The XT5 partition contains 18,688 compute nodes in addition to dedicated login/service nodes. Each compute node contains dual hex-core AMD Opteron 2435 (Istanbul) processors running at 2.6GHz, 16GB of DDR2-800 memory, and a SeaStar 2+ router. The resulting partition contains 224,256 processing cores, 300TB of memory, and a peak performance of 2.3 petaflop/s (2.3 quadrillion floating point operations per second).

2. National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen's "Nebulae" - China
System Family - Dawning Cluster
System Model - Dawning TC3600 Blade System
Computer - Dawning TC3600 Blade, Intel X5650, NVidia Tesla C2050 GPU
Vendor - Dawning
Application area - Research
Installation Year - 2010
Operating System - Linux
Interconnect - Infiniband QDR
Processors - Intel EM64T Xeon X56xx (Westmere-EP) 2660 MHz (10.64 GFlops)

3. DOE/NNSA/LANL's "Roadrunner" - USA
System Name - Roadrunner
Site - DOE/NNSA/LANL
System Family - IBM Cluster
System Model - BladeCenter QS22 Cluster
Computer - BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband
Vendor - IBM
Application area - Not Specified
Installation Year - 2009
Operating System - Linux
Interconnect - Infiniband
Processors - PowerXCell 8i 3200 MHz (12.8 GFlops)

4. National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee's "Kraken" - USA
Kraken Cray XT5 system specifications:
Cray Linux Environment (CLE) 2.2
A peak performance of 1.03 PetaFLOP
99,072 compute cores
129 TB of compute memory
A 3.3 PB raw parallel file system of disk storage for scratch space (2.4 PB available)
8,256 compute nodes
Each node has:
Two 2.6 GHz six-core AMD Opteron processors (Istanbul)
12 cores
16 GB of memory
Connection via Cray SeaStar2+ router

5. Forschungszentrum Juelich's "JUGENE" - Germany
Site Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
System Family -IBM BlueGene
System Model - BlueGene/P
Computer - Blue Gene/P Solution
Vendor - IBM
Application area -Research
Installation Year - 2009
Operating System - CNK/SLES 9
Interconnect - Proprietary
Processors - PowerPC 450 850 MHz (3.4 GFlops)

******

My personal top 5 list of Supercomputers:

1. SkyNet - Terminator Series
2. WOPR - Wargames
3. Colossus & Guardian - Colossus: The Forbin Project
4. Deep Thought - Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
5. I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. - Team America: World Police

Posted: Oct 27 2010 03:46 pm

Damn, cool stuff. I can't imagine what kind of shit those computers can do.

I'll add a few favorite supercomputers to Knyte's list:
--HAL
--Teletran 1 (Transformers)
--Arsenal Gear (Metal Gear)
--The one Richard Pryor built in Superman 3
--Penny's computer book (seriously, that thing could do everything - Inspector Gadget)

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

I have always been a much bigger fan of distributed computing. Super computers are limited by funding and space... Distributed just leeches off everyone.

Best example I can think of:
http://folding.stanford.edu

Posted: Oct 27 2010 04:16 pm

Working in a Data Center, the Jaguar and Kraken scream cool. I can't imagine how many cooling units they have installed to keep that room cool. Or what the mess under the perf tiles (floor) looks like. Maybe I'll show my boss and we can make a really cool animal like the "Otter" or the "Porcupine".

Wizard Joined: Jun 12 2009 Posts: 4209

I can't believe no one's mentioned GLADOS.

Posted: Oct 27 2010 10:01 pm

I bet there's so much porn stored on those things.

Posted: Oct 28 2010 10:02 am

Well isn't this a hell of a coincidence......saw this today on Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101028/tc_afp/chinatechnologyitworld

Posted: Oct 28 2010 11:06 am

Ice2SeeYou wrote:

Well isn't this a hell of a coincidence......saw this today on Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101028/tc_afp/chinatechnologyitworld

But, can it run Crysis?

Posted: Oct 28 2010 11:29 pm

It's not a literal supercomputer, but I met a guy that could run Crysis, Prey, and FarCry 2 very well. AT THE SAME TIME. I almost shat myself at the time.

UsaSatsui's Youtube Channel · Posted: Oct 29 2010 12:10 pm

E. Most Peninsula wrote:

It's not a literal supercomputer, but I met a guy that could run Crysis, Prey, and FarCry 2 very well. AT THE SAME TIME. I almost shat myself at the time.

Yes, we know, Not Sure is a very impressive machine.

Posted: Oct 31 2010 02:09 am

UsaSatsui wrote:

E. Most Peninsula wrote:

It's not a literal supercomputer, but I met a guy that could run Crysis, Prey, and FarCry 2 very well. AT THE SAME TIME. I almost shat myself at the time.

Yes, we know, Not Sure is a very impressive machine.

Zing!

Also, supercomputers are awesome. It's so amazing how far technology has come. Strange that the bullshit, insanely underpowered loaner laptop I'm using now would have been considered a "supercomputer" back in the day, too...

Posted: Nov 01 2010 01:59 am

Some of you may remember this fun fact from my VGM article about The Last Starfighter:

Quote:

FUN FACT: The CGI used in the movie was created on a Cray X-MP Supercomputer, The X-MP was sold with one, two, or four processors and from two to sixteen megawords (16–128 MB) of word-addressable RAM main memory (while initial memory capacity was limited to 16 megawords with a 24-bit address register, the later extended memory architecture XMP/EA raised addressable memory to a theoretical 2 gigawords, in practice the largest memory produced was 64 megawords. The XMP/EA had an 8.5 nanosecond clock), delivering a theoretical peak speed of 942 megaflops. In 1984, a X-MP/48 was about US$15 million plus the cost of disks. In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of a Xbox.* (The original, not the 360 even!)

Posted: Nov 01 2010 10:31 am

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

Posted: Nov 01 2010 10:37 am

Knyte wrote:

But, can it run Crysis?

Not on Max settings.

Posted: Nov 01 2010 01:55 pm

Knyte wrote:

Some of you may remember this fun fact from my VGM article about The Last Starfighter:

Quote:

FUN FACT: The CGI used in the movie was created on a Cray X-MP Supercomputer, The X-MP was sold with one, two, or four processors and from two to sixteen megawords (16–128 MB) of word-addressable RAM main memory (while initial memory capacity was limited to 16 megawords with a 24-bit address register, the later extended memory architecture XMP/EA raised addressable memory to a theoretical 2 gigawords, in practice the largest memory produced was 64 megawords. The XMP/EA had an 8.5 nanosecond clock), delivering a theoretical peak speed of 942 megaflops. In 1984, a X-MP/48 was about US$15 million plus the cost of disks. In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of a Xbox.* (The original, not the 360 even!)

That's interesting. I'm not sure what year The Last Starfighter came out (too lazy to check IMDB right now), but the CGI looked way ahead of it's time. That would explain it.....they used a supercomputer. Wonder how much that cost the studio?