Talk:Supercomputer

Contents

1 SFX, c. animation: Super apps? 2 Distributed computing § 3 New king of the hill from NEC? 4 Preserved section 5 Separate categorization 6 SETI@Home 7 Flops 8 Google?

SFX, c. animation: Super apps?

Are "special effects" and "computer animation" really applications of supercomputers? I kind of doubt it. I would add molecular modelling and climate research to the list. AxelBoldt, Monday, April 22, 2002

They used to be, IIRC, but these days it seems that CGI is done on either workstations, or, if that's not enough, rackfuls of commodity compute servers. --Robert Merkel

The history of supercomputers and animation is rather limited and somewhat overblown.

To appreciate this statement, a reader has to remember that early machines had limited enough memory that graphics came late, because the application needed the memory or secondary storage (competition in compute time and space [and this is not the linear address space in memory but the scaling of 2-dimensions of graphics space]). Early crude and high resolution graphics did exist, it was just very expensive, and expense is not something show "business" is known, especially expensive computers (consider that movies don't use full sized real buildings at studios, they use facades, their computers were at first facades of blinking lights).

In short, short output movies were made by supercomputer users (many classified as many supercomputers were), but full length Hollywood style animation began a spin off firms from supercomputer firms and users like MAGI (Mathematical Algorithms Group, Inc), Information Intl., Inc. (better known as III or I^3), Whitney-Deimos, etc. Lucasfilm, for instance, used a Cray at Cray Research, but never brought one despite one of the best offers presented, in large part due to maintenance costs.

This begs the question whether the existing clusters used by animation firms are supercomputers: they sort of are if you want to view clusters as supercomputers (and not every one does, and in part this is reflected by what the older end users of machines use ).

--enm

Distributed computing §

Would be interesting to put a paragraph about distributed computing (such as seti@home, folding etc). --user:Extremist

Distributed computing has some discussion of that. Scott McNay 08:37, 2004 Feb 15 (UTC)

New king of the hill from NEC?

Hmm, NEC strikes back: NEC Launches World’s Fastest Vector Supercomputer (http://www.hpce.nec.com/445+M5043fbf9d60.0.html) (press release, 20 October 2004). Perhaps it should be listed in this article's table (if the performance figures are for real)? --Wernher 01:33, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It hasn't been tested yet for Top500, and the full version of Blue Gene will be up and running shortly. NEC just wanted to get headlines before IBM really sets the bar high. -Joseph (Talk) 01:53, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)

It appears that's a moot point now, as the new SGI/NASA system is potentially faster—certainly faster than Blue Gene/L right now, and maybe faster than the SX-8. I think we should hold off making any such changes until the Top500 list is released in a week. Once the full Blue Gene system comes online, hopefully the situation will stabilize (for a little while anyhow.) -Joseph (Talk) 11:18, 2004 Oct 27 (UTC)

Hey, cool that the Top500 list is coming so soon. I certainly look forward to seeing it, considering all the interesting stuff happening in supers these days. --Wernher 18:13, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Preserved section

I preserved this edited section by an anonymous individual. I am reverting the main article because this whole section is changing in just a couple of days, so it seems pointless to do these edits. Plus he made a couple of changes that do not make any sense. -Joseph (Talk) 22:10, 2004 Oct 28 (UTC)

BEGIN

== The fastest supercomputers today ==

The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in flops (floating point operations per second); this measurement ignores communication overheads and assumes that all processors of the machine are provided with data and are working at full speed. It is therefore less than ideal as a metric, but is widely used nevertheless.

As of October 26, 2004, the fastest supercomputer is NASA/SGI's Columbia (named in honour of the crew that died on the Columbia, with a total of 10,240 Intel processors which reached 42.7 teraflops. The system, running the Linux operating system is already in use at a customer website and is fully functional unlike other recent supercomputer announcements. It was built in just 120 days by SGI and Intel and consists of 20 machines, although only 16 were used to acheive the 42.7 record.

Prior to Columbia, the fastest supercomputer was IBM's Blue Gene/L prototype, with 16,250 PowerPC based processors which reached 36.01 teraflops beating the NEC Earth Simulator which reached 35.86 teraflops.

END

Also, I wanted to note that the figures for the Columbia are not yet final. They will likely be releasing new figures at Supercomputer 2004, and at that conference we may see new figures for other systems. Also, Top 500 has not tested the Columbia yet—or at least the figures are not public. (They will be in a few days anyhow.) -Joseph (Talk) 23:34, 2004 Oct 28 (UTC)

Separate categorization

Should we separately categorize vector vs. scalar systems? Or at least have a timeline split at that point? -Joseph (Talk) 03:50, 2004 Nov 6 (UTC)

SETI@Home

I don't really think this belongs. It's a distributed computing project, sure, but not a supercomputer. -Joseph (Talk) 18:39, 2004 Nov 16 (UTC)

It's not a supercomputer in perhaps the original sense, but then, neither are the modern computing clusters that we call supercomputers. Blue Gene is nothing more than an amalgamation of a bunch of off-the-shelf processors and networking equipment, with some specialized technology. SETI@home acts as a supercomputer in a similar manner with a processing throughput in excess of what is supposed to be the world's fastest supercomputer. It is an achievement that should be noted in this article. --Alexwcovington 22:06, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

SETI@home doesn't act as a classic supercomputer, it's a distributed machine. Modern computing clusters do act like a supercomputer. BlueGene runs tightly-coupled problems; SETI@home does not. This doesn't mean SETI@home is bad or anything, it just is a different beast. Can you name anyone involved in supercomputing who think SETI@home is a supercomputer? I don't think so. Apple marketing has tried hard enough to debase the term, don't do the same regarding SETI@home. Greg

I separated this out into its own section. We may want to put it somewhere else in the page. -Joseph (Talk) 21:39, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

Flops

Hi. As someone who knows jack about supercomputers, I'd like to point out that some parts of the article are just impenetrable for the uninitiated. For instance, when it says that the IBM supercomputer is capable of "70 teraflops", that tells me nothing, and the article on Flops doesn't help any in understanding what it means in terms of how fast the computer works. Maybe you could include a reference in the good old "calculations per second" unit, or maybe something else, but right now I just have no idea of how fast and efficient the IBM supercomputer is, no matter how many flops I know it can throw around. Regards, Redux 05:52, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Google?

I know the Googleplex must be pretty impressive, but I'm not sure if it's valid to compare it to traditional supercomputers - surely estimating its speed in FLOPS is misleading at best, as the majority of its workload is probably integer (string-heavy parsing, analysis, crawling, network stuff, etc.)?