Supercomputers. Alex Reid & James O'Donoghue

Transcription

1 Supercomputers Alex Reid & James O'Donoghue

2 The Need for Supercomputers Supercomputers allow large amounts of processing to be dedicated to calculation-heavy problems Supercomputers are centralized in one location, allowing for high-speed communication within the computer Specific Applications throughout the years: o 1970s: Aerodynamic research o 1980s: Radiation shielding modeling o 1990s: 3D nuclear test simulations o 2010s: Molecular Dynamics Simulation All applications would be difficult to simulate on individual machines

3 History of the Supercomputer: Origins Seymour Cray, working at Control Data Corporation, puts together the CDC 6600 At this time, machines used one CPU to drive entire system The CPC's CPUs handled only arithmetic and logic, letting Peripheral Processors (PP) handle I/O 6600 had one CPU and 10 PPs System ran at 1 MFLOPS, world's fastest computer from times faster than any machine of its time One hundred machines produced, sold for $8 Million each, defining the supercomputer market

4 History of the Supercomputer: Cray In 1975, Seymour Cray and Jim Thornton developed the 80 MHz Cray-1. The Cray-1 used vector processing, many registers, and pipelining for fast vector and scalar operations. Ran at 80 MFLOPS Most successful Supercomputer in history Crays defined supercomputers for much of the 70s and 80s Cray-1 Supercomputer

5 History of the Supercomputer: Cray 64-bit System 24-bit Addressing 72-bit Word Length (64-bit data, 8-bit parity check) 12 pipelined functional units

6 History of the Supercomputer: Multi- Processor Examining part of the ASCI Red At its peak in popularity, the best Cray supercomputer had at most 8 Cores The 90s introduced many multiprocessor systems including: o Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel (166 Vector Processors, 280 GFLOPS) o Hitachi SR2201 (2048 Processors, 600 GFLOPS) Inter-processor communication was crucial Developments in this area led to the ASCI Red, the first computer to beat 1 TFLOP

7 History of the Supercomputer: Intel Paragon

8 History of the Supercomputer: Petascale Post-2000, the trend of many small units to achieve high performance continued, many systems consisting of many nodes with many processors Top Supercomputers of the last decade: o 2000 IBM ASCI White TFLOPS o 2002 NEC Earth Simulator TFLOPS o 2004 IBM Blue Gene/L 70.72TFLOPS o 2005 IBM Blue Gene/L TFLOPS o 2007 IBM Blue Gene/L TFLOPS o 2008 IBM Roadrunner PFLOPS o 2009 Cray Jaguar PFLOPS o 2010 Tianhe-IA PFLOPS o 2011 Fujitsu K computer PFLOPS o 2012 Cray Titan 20 PFLOPS Heat and power are becoming increasingly important - The K computer uses 12.6 MW, costing $970/hr to run, or 8.5 million dollars in a year. Fujitsu K-Computer, individual rack

9 History of the Supercomputer: Blue Gene

10 History of the SuperComputer

11 Cluster Computing Clusters are a modern, inexpensive solution to run high-processing power tasks Made from many cheap nodes, connected via ethernet Low-cost, commodity solutions

12 Supercomputers VS Cluster Computing Clusters are much cheaper and easier to assemble vs supercomputers Supercomputers, due to their custom construction, can be designed to be much more powerefficient, and reach much higher speeds. Both design approaches have their uses in different circumstances o o Clusters are appropriate for many low-cost situations with a limited amount of software needed Supercomputers excel when max-performance is needed and custom software can be written

13 Supercomputer Node Communication Mesh Network Torus Message Passing Interface(Cray) Wireless Network on Chip

14 Supercomputer Node Communication: Torus Rectilinear array of 2 or more dimensions Processors connected to nearest neighbor Number of connections equals 2 times the dimension

15 Operating Systems used in Supercomputing The first supercomputers used custom OS to help increase performance. Generic OS so began to overtake custom made OS due to reduced cost. Generic OS were tailored to specific systems, depending on specifications Multi-core systems sometimes run different OS depending on what the core might be doing, EX: computing core or I/O core

16 Operating Systems used in Supercomputing

17 Current Limitations Heat produced by current systems Power consumption Money

18 Questions?