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History of Supercomputers
History of Supercomputers
Submitted By:
Sweety Yadava
History of Supercomputers
A supercomputer is defined as a mainframe computer that is one of the fastest and most powerful. Supercomputers
have grown and changed throughout their history. Their speed is unparalleled, their future is exciting, and their uses
are nearly limitless. The term "Super Computing" was first used by New York World newspaper in 1929 to refer to
large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University. Since then, the growth in the speed of
supercomputing has taken a steady pace with a doubling time of 1.55 year in terms of Floating point Operations Per
Seconds as can be seen in Figure 1 below. The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer
tends to become tomorrow's normal computer. The history of the development in the field of supercomputers has
been described in phases in further sections.
704. IBM 704 was the first mass produced computers that worked on floating-point hardware. IBM 704 was further
improved to IBM 709 and IBM 7090 subsequently which had capabilities of overlapped I/O, Indirect addressing,
decimal instruction and the use of transistors respectively.
Year 1960-1980
In the early days of 1960, remarkable advancements in the area of supercomputing was made. A company named
LARC designed the first multiprocessing supercomputer which worked along with two central processing units and
a separate I/O processor. It comprised of 26 general purpose registers with an access time of 1 microseconds which
used a special form of decimal arithmetic system that could use 48 bits per word. It had core memory of 8 banks that
could store upto 20000 words with an access time of 8 microseconds and a cycle time of 4 microseconds. The I/O
processor could control 12 magnetic drums, 4 tape drives, a printer and a punched card reader. In the year 1961,
IBM launched a newer version of 7090 known as IBM 7030 in competition with LARC. It termed out to be a failure
as in spite being 30 times faster than 7090. Many advanced ideas of multiprogramming, memory protection,
generalized interrupts, 8 byte instruction pipelining, prefetch and decoding developed for 7030 were used in further
development of supercomputers and modern day CPUs.
Seymor Cray was employed by Control Data Corporation (CDC) in the year 1965 to develop a supercomputer
named CDC 6600 which could 10 times faster than any computers of that era. Seymor Cray was also nicknamed as
father of supercomputing in the later years for his contribution in the field of supercomputers. He developed a
simple set of instruction for CDC 6600 to simplify the timing within the CPU. The instruction pipelining that
developed in the result lead to achieve higher clock speed of 10 MHz for the first time ever. A logical address
translation was used in the CDC 6600 to map the address in the user programs so that only one portion of the core
memory was used at a time which helped in further movement of the user program within the core memory by the
operating system. CDC 6600 was designed to contain 10 peripheral processors to handle I/O and run the operating
system. The CDC 6600 is shown in Figure 2.
The CDC Star-100 was the advanced version of CDC 6600 developed in the year 1974 and was the first machine
ever to use a vector processor. The vector pipeline developed for CDC Star 100 was capable of filling only 50 data
points per set into the vector pipeline at high setup cost. The scalar performance was sacrificed to improve the vector
performance to process the algorithm at a very slow rate. This machine was termed to be a failure as it lacked
several capabilities and was sold at a higher cost. In the year 1975, a new company called Cray research was
founded by Seymour Cray which developed a new supercomputer called Cray-1. Cray-1 had improved vector
performance along with high scalar performance as well. It used vector registers along with ECL transistors for
memory operations having wire lengths less than 4 long. Worlds first auto-vecotrising fortran compiler developed
on this platform had a 8MB ram and a clock speed of 80 MHz and recorded a speed of 160 million floating point
operations per second. A new cooling system for supercomputers using Freon was developed by CRAY to overcome
the heating problems encountered in this super computer.
Year 1980-1990
The era of 1980-1990 are also referred as vector years as a large number of small competitors entered into the
market of supercomputers and most of them couldnt sustain the growing rate of competition in the field. IBM and
HP purchased many of such companies in 1980 which helped them in gaining expertise and experience for the
present day market of super computers. The CDC developed a newer version of CDC star-100 known as CDC
Cyber-205 in competition to CRAY-1 in 1981. It composed of a hand crafted assembly code with 1-4 separate vector
units made of semiconductor memory. Even after all these efforts CDC Cyber-205 could not match the peak speed
of its competitors. In the year 1983, CRAY Research developed a parallel (1-4) vector processor machine having a
clock speed of 120 MHz with 8-128 MB RAM known as CRAY X-MP. It had a processing speed of 125 milliion
floating point operations per second per CPU. It had better chaining support with parallel arithmetic pipelines and
shared memory access with multiple pipelines per processor. It was also launched with support of UNIX Operating
system in 1984 which widened its applicability.
IN the year 1985, CRAY-2 was developed which was a compact design with 4-8 processor and consisted of main
memory in a range of 512 MB-4 GB but had a lower memory latency than CRAY X-MP. CRAY Y-MP was launched
in 1988 had upto 16 processors. In response to the growing competition CDC developed a new product called ETA10 in 1989, which also turned out to be a failure like his previous counterparts. ETA-10 was compatible with CDC
Cyber-205 had pipelined memory and came with two cooling variants. ETA-10 had lower memory capacity than its
counterpart CRAY-2. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel
processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom
designs.
During this era, many of the Japanese companies like NEC, Fujitsu and Hitachi also entered into the market of
supercomputers and contributed significantly in the field of vector computing by their knowledge in chip
technology. The vector processor developed by NEC SX-3 was the most powerful processor ever built at the rate of
5.5 Giga Floating point operations per second. Fujitsu developed an architecture for vector computing in the early
1990 which was known as Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel. It was built with advanced semiconductors (Ga-As)
which hada gate delay of less than 60 pico seconds. Each of the CPU had 4 independent pipelines with a peak speed
of 1.7 Giga-floating point operations per second and a main memory of 256 MB.
Year 1990-2010
The advancement in CMOS VLSI technology brought up a radical change in the super computer industry. The size
of the microprocessor started reducing and the clock speed crossed the barrier of 100 MHz in this era. The low cost
and high speed microprocessor developed in 1990s brought about a boom in the field of supercomputers. A massive
parallel processing machine called Intel ASCI-Red (Figure 3) was developed in 1995 under the Accelerated Strategic
Computing Initiative (ASCI) program of the Department of Energy (DoE) an National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) for building a nuclear weapon simulator. It is based on multiple instruction, multiple data
(MIMD) paradigm with 38x32x2 CPUs (Pentium II Xeons), 1212 GB RAM 12.5 TB hard disk.
Beowulf super computer was developed in 1994, by Don Becker and Thomas Sterling at Goddard Space Flight
Center in NASA. It is made from 16 486DX processor built with 10 Mbps Ethernet bus. Although such a system has
a speed of single digit Giga floating point operation per second but has a capability of being build anywhere by
anyone with the help of commonly used home computers.In the year 2000, IBM came up with ASCI-White which
was a cluster of RS/6000 SP computer. It was composed of 512 machines each containing 16 CPUs and had 6 TB
RAM with 160 TB of disk memory. A similar cluster was developed in 2002 which was based on NEC SX-6
computers with 8 vector processor and 16 GB RAM. It was designed to simulate the global climate change with its
640 nodes comprising of 5120 CPUs and 10 TB RAM. IBM also came up with a newer version ASCI Blue Gene
in 2005 which was 10 times faster than the Earth Simulator. It was a constellation computer made of integrated
collection of smaller parallel nodes. It was composed of 65536 CPUs connected through 3 integrated networks at
different underlying topologies. In the Year 2008, IBM came up with the fastest super computer built yet called the
Roadrunner. It is composed of 6,480 dual core Opteron CPUs to handle O/S, interconnection and scheduling with
12,980 Power XCell 8i CPUs specifically to handle computation. It is a unique hybrid architecture which needs
specially written software with complex programs.
2010-present
An upgraded version of the Jaguar was built by CRAY in 2012 called the Titan. Titan uses a graphical processing
unit in addition of the conventional Central processing Unit in a hybrid archietecture. It is made up of 18,688 AMD
Opteron 6274 16-core CPUs and 18,688 Nvidia Tesla K20X GPUs. It has a storage capacity of over 40 PB with a
file transfer capacity of 1.4 TB/Sec. It has a total memory of 693.5 TiB comprising tof both CUP and GPU.
Tianhe -2 (Also Known as Milky way 2) is currently the worlds fastest super computer developed by a team of 1300
scientist and engineers under the 863 high technology program by Chinese government in 2013. Tianhe-2 consist of
16000 computer nodes, each comprising of two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon
Phi coprocessor chips. TIanhe-2 has a memory of 1375 TiB and has a speed of 33.86 PFLOPS with a storage
capacity of 12.4 PB. Table 1 below provides a list of top 5 supercomputers currently in operation throughout the
world according to their ranking in top500.org.
S. NO.
SITE
SYSTEM
CORES
RMAX
(TFLOP/S)
3,120,000
33,862.70
China
DOE/SC/Oak
Ridge
National Laboratory
NUDT
Titan - Cray XK7 , Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz,
Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x
560,640
17,590.00
United States
Cray Inc.
DOE/NNSA/LLNL
1,572,864
17,173.20
United States
IBM
705,024
10,510.00
786,432
8,586.60
United States
IBM
Fujitsu
Mira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz,
Custom
References:
1.
2.
3. Woodford,
Chris.
(2012),
Supercomputers.
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