Personal Chris Ward CS147 Fall 2008

 Recent offerings from NVIDA show that small companies or even individuals can now afford and own Super Computers.  Just what is a “Super Computer”?

 “A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. “ –wikipedia  The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's ordinary computer.

 In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop/s) is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second  Today’s two fastest Super Computers operate at > 1 petaflop/s (represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second. )

Most applications use double precision math for the following reasons: 1. To minimize the accumulation of round-off error, 2. For ill-conditioned problems that require higher precision 3. The 8 bit exponent defined by the IEEE floating point standard for 32-bit arithmetic will not accommodate the calculation, or 4. There are critical sections in the code which require higher precision.

 Some of the latest GPUs and CPUs have LARGE differences in flops for single vs double precision  Researchers are recognizing this trend and re- examining their algorithms to take advantage of single precision whenever possible

 GPU Graphics Processing Unit  CPU Central Processing unit DeviceTransistor CountYear ReleasedMaker RV AMD GT NVIDIA Dual-Core Itanium Intel Quad-Core Itanium Tukwila Intel

 Tesla S1070 Computer is a four-teraflop 1U system powered by the world’s first one-teraflop processor.  Each of the 4 cores contains 240 GPUs (960 total)  Single Precision floating point performance (peak) 3.73 to 4.14 Tflops  Double Precision floating point performance (peak) 311 to 345 Gflops  Starting at about $3,995 to ~ $10,000

1 Board= 240 Processing Cores ~ 1 TFlop performance 4GB GDDR3 RAM PCI-Express 2.0, Write your code in C and run in Windows or Linux $1,699.99

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