1. - Rohan Dhamnaskar

2. Overview  What is a Supercomputer  Some Concepts  Couple of examples.

3. sōō'p ə r-k ə m-pyōō't ə r

4. Supercomputer  Dictionary definition: a very fast, powerful mainframe computer, used in advanced military and scientific applications.  For our sake: Computer SYSTEM designed to operate at super high speeds which can perform complex calculations that would require greater than a year for a normal computer.

5. Measuring Performance  FLOPS: FL oating point O perations P er S econd Usually prefixed by an SI unit of magnitude ○ Megaflops, Gigaflops, Teraflops, Petaflops ○ Usual 3GHz processor ~ 6 GFLOPS.  LINPACK: A Benchmark software library written in FORTRAN to compute a n x n systems of Linear Algebra. (MATH 129A!)  The result is reported in MFLOPS.

6. Parallel Processing Architechures

7. Cluster Architecture  Each Computer (Node) is a complete Computer  Connected to each other via a high speed bus  Job broken up into blocks of data and executed independently.  Cheap and easy to produce.

8. SDSU Supercomputers - DataStar  IBM Power4+ based  Performance: 15.6 teraflops (Overall)  ~ 6.2 teraflops each ( 4 separate cluster sets)  Processors: 2528 IBM p-Series (1.5 ~ 1.7 GHz)  Memory: 7.3 TB  Storage: 180 TB

9. SDSU Supercomputers - Intimidata  IBM BG/L eServer (Blue Gene System)  Performance: 17.2 teraflops (Overall) 13.83 teraflops (LINPACK)  Processors: 6144 PowerPC (700 MHz / 2 processors per Node)  Memory: 1.5 TB  Storage: 25 TB

10. Virginia Tech – System X  1110 Xserve G5 servers  Performance: 12.25 teraflops (Overall) 10 teraflops (LINPACK)  Processors: 2200 PowerPC (2.3 GHz / 2 processors per Node)  Memory: 4.3 TB  Storage: 16 TB  CHEAP!!!

11. Uses  Supercomputers are mainly used to simulate: DNA / Protein Structures (Biology / Bioinformatics) Molecular Dynamics (Chemistry) Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence (Physics) Earthquake and Seismic activity (Geology) Fourier Transforms and Algebraic Systems (Mathematics) Global warming patterns (Environmental Sciences) Virtual CAD/CAM Design (Engineering) Solar atmosphere and Supernova Dynamics (Astronomy) NO COMPUTER SCIENCE ???

12. Multiprocessor Architecture I/O Port Device Controller CPU Memory CPU BUSBUS

13. Multiprocessor Architecture  2 to 8 processors (cores)  Communication via Memory and System bus  Large memory. (Memory Pool)  Still Cheaper but lacks performance.  Uses: Workstations, Application Servers, Gaming!!!

14. AMD Phenom – Quad Core  Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz (2 MB L2 + 2 MB L3 on chip)  Processor – Processor Bandwidth: 27.2 GB/s  Front Side Bus: Upto1066MHz  Uses : Gaming / Server

15. …..Thank you

16. Further Info.  VirginiaTech Advanced Reasearch Computing Center. http://www.arc.vt.edu/arc/  San Diego Supercomputing Center. http://www.sdsc.edu/  AMD Multicore Technology. http://multicore.amd.com/  LINPACK. http://www.netlib.org/linpack/  Lecture Notes: Parallel Computing. Dr. Lee.