1. SUPERCOMPUTERS A Brief History by Jenny Grant

2. What is a Supercomputer ? Definition: – Any computer able to process information at the highest capacity. How is this measured? – FLOPS: FLoating-point Operations Per Second.

3. Early History 1960’s – 1980’s – CDC 6600 Created by Seymour Cray in 1964. – Supercomputers were the standard of large government agencies and government funded institutions. Source of national pride. Symbolic of technical leadership. Ultimate symbols of strength and power.

4. First Computer In comparison to the computers of today, ENIAC was incredibly enormous: – weighing 30 short tons – dimensions of about 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet – taking up 680 square feet. – Its components included 17,468 vacuum tubes 7,200 crystal diodes 1,500 relays 70,000 resistors 10,000 capacitors It could consume 150 kilowatts of electricity ENIAC

5. Today’s Computers Gaming has taken the helm for supercomputing. Governments continue to race each other to build the next fastest computer. Consumers are able to capitalize on technology advances in government.

6. Today’s Leaders China – Once again taken the lead – China's Tianhe-2 Remains The World's Fastest Supercomputer 33.86 petaflop/s Twice as fast as the 2 nd fastest

7. Today’s Leaders cont. United States – Has the most supercomputers 233 in the TOP 500 – Titan supercomputer installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Cray XK7 system occupying 200 cabinets reached a speed of 17.59 petaflops -- 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second

8. Uses for Supercomputers Aid in United States research – Climate Change – Bio-fuels – Nuclear Energy Healthcare – Mapping the bloodstream – Protein folding

9. The Future “Exascale” Computing – Could operate at one quintillion flop/s – Projected implementation by 2018 Cognitive Computing – IBM creates new SyNAPSE chip to further cognitive computing – one million programmable neurons, 256 million programmable synapses and 46 billion synaptic operations per second, per watt.

10. In Review

11. References http://www.ehow.com/facts_6776045_history-supercomputers.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/06/technology/enterprise/fastest- supercomputer/index.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427891 /moores-law-over-supercomputing-in-triage-says- expert/