 2kmaroThinkPremium,ExMod 1 BC
join:2000-07-11
ColossalCave | Did Some Serious Tweaking? Interesting that just last September this same machine had been clocked at 36 teraflops - so they've come close to doubling that in just 2 months!
The first computer classified as a Supercomputer was the Cray-I which had a top speed of about 160 megaflops.
I wonder if all test results were from the same test type? Seems the current 'standard' is the Linpack benchmark, and I'm not sure when that standard was initiated.
Oh well, here's some interesting milestones in mainframe histories:
»courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs4234/hw1/sol.html
(20pts)
Illiac IV. Date(s) of the project: around 1965. Company or University: University of Illinois. Characteristics:
64 processors and a 13MHz clock
Total memory : 1MB memory (64x16KB).
Each processor has a peak speed of 4 MFLOPS.
The machine's I/O system is capable of 500 Mbit/s.
Its actual performance was 15 MFLOPS.
1 control unit which could access all system memory and control the 64 processing elements (PEs)
Each PE had some local memory.
Each PE had some memory shared with adjacent processing elements
Connection Machine-I. Date(s) of the project: 1985/86. Company or University: Danny Hillis and his company Thinking Machine Corporation. Characteristics:
These machines had 65,536 simple 1-bit processors that could simultaneously perform the same calculation, each on its own separate data set.
Processors connected into a hypercube and each having 4Kbits of memory.
Every processor is connected to a central unit called the microcontroller which issues identical nanoinstructions to all of them.
Cray-I. Date(s) of the project: 1976. Company or University: Cray Research Lab. Characteristics:
World-record speed of 133 MFLOPS/160 MFLOPS.
8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory.
In order to increase the speed of this system, the Cray-1 had a unique "C" shape which enabled integrated circuits to be closer together.
No wire in the system was more than four feet long.
To handle the intense heat generated by the computer, Cray developed an innovative refrigeration system using Freon.
KSR1
Date(s) of the project: 1992 Company or University: Kendal Square Research Corp. Characteristics:
A virtual shared-memory machine.
KSR called their memory system ALLCACHE.
Could get 8-1088 processors. 50 ns clock rate. 32 MB memory per processor
The "Earth Simulator" is currently number 1. It consists of 640 nodes, each of which is an 8-processor vector machine. So a total of 5120 processors. Each node has 16GB of memory, for a total of 10TB across the whole machine. The interconncetion network is a 640x640 crossbar network. The machine achieved 35.86 Tflops on the linpack benchmark.
»www.post-gazette.com/pg/04274/387918.stm
The Red Storm computer being built at Sandia will be capable of up to 41.5 teraflops when it is completed next year, which likely will make it the world's most powerful. Earlier this week, IBM said its unfinished Blue Gene L System is sustaining speeds of 36 teraflops, which unofficially makes it the fastest for now.
»www.newscientist.com/news/news.j···99996631
More about the Big BlueGene/L from the article:
But it remains to be seen just how stable the system will be once completed. Among its ultimate tasks, the completed version of BlueGene/L will be used to carry out complex simulations designed to assess the condition of ageing nuclear weapons |
