1. Personal Chris Ward CS147 Fall 2008

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

3.  “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.

4.  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. )

6. 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.

7.  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

8.  GPU Graphics Processing Unit  CPU Central Processing unit DeviceTransistor CountYear ReleasedMaker RV770956 000 0002008AMD GT2001 400 000 0002008NVIDIA Dual-Core Itanium 21 700 000 0002006Intel Quad-Core Itanium Tukwila2 000 000 0002008Intel

10.  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

11. 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

13.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_computer  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS  http://www.top500.org/list/2008/11/100 http://www.top500.org/list/2008/11/100  http://www.top500.org/project/linpack http://www.top500.org/project/linpack  http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html  http://www.cgarena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=60618 http://www.cgarena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=60618  http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_s1070_us.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_s1070_us.html  http://www.hpcwire.com/features/17885244.html http://www.hpcwire.com/features/17885244.html  http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item- details.asp?EdpNo=4259469&CatId=4044 http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item- details.asp?EdpNo=4259469&CatId=4044