Supercomputers are computers with a high level of computational capacity compared to general purpose computers. They are used for highly calculation intensive tasks like weather forecasting, nuclear weapon simulations, and data analysis. The history of supercomputing dates back to the 1960s. Modern supercomputers use parallel processing techniques like distributed and shared memory architectures to achieve very high performance measured in floating-point operations per second. Common supercomputer architectures include UMA, ccNUMA, massively parallel processing, and clusters.

1. Super computer

2. Contents
 Introduction
 History
 Need&application
 Examples
 Technology
 Architecture
 Amdahl's Law

3. Introduction
 A supercomputer is a computer with a
high level of computational
capacity compared to a general-purpose
computer

4. History
 The history of supercomputing goes back to the
1960s, with the Atlas at the University of
Manchester designed by Seymour Cray
 The ”Atlas” was a joint venture between ’Ferranti’ and
the ‘Manchester University’ and was operated at
processing speed of one microsecond per
instruction, about one million instructions per
second.
 The first “Atlas” was officially commissioned on 7
December 1962 as one of the world's first
supercomputers and is equivalent to four IBM 7094s.

5. Need & Application
 Used for solving highly calculation intensive tasks
like in
 Weather forecasts
 Explosions - detonation of nuclear weapons
 Analysis of data
 Astronomical observations
 Integrate design of engineering products

6. Examples of super computers
 Ex: CDC6600
 1-10 MFlops
 Single CPU
 60-bit word length
 RISC
 Central Processor has 10 parallel functional units
-superscalar.
 Implemented 10 peripheral processors
 no pipelining

7. EX:
 CDC7600 (1969-1975)
 10-100 MFlops
 Instruction Pipelining
 Pipelined execution on functional units in parallel 8
processors
( Cray series)
Worked on new design - vector processors load large
data at once.

8. Technology in super conductors
 Performance of a supercomputer is measured
in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS)
instead of million instructions per second (MIPS)
 parallel computing is a type of computation in
which many calculations or the execution
of processes are carried out simultaneously.
 Using N processors, we expect the execution
time to come down N times ideally hence
speedup by N

9.  1 processor::T(1) = s + p = 1 i.e., p = 1 - s
 n processors:: T(n) = s + (p/n)
 Scalability (Speed Up) = T(1)/T(n) = 1/(s+(1-s)/n)
Amdahl's law

10. Architecture of super computer
 Different architectures to implement parallel
algorithm
 1 Shared-memory systems
 Uniform Memory Access (UMA)
 cache coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access
(ccNUMA)
 2 Distributed-memory systems
 Massively Parallel Processing
 Cluster computing
 Each has a standardized programming model

11. Shared memory systems
 Two basic categories of shared memory systems
 Uniform Memory Access (UMA): Memory is
equally accessible to all processors with the same
performance (Bandwidth & Latency)
 Simplest example - dual core processor
 cache-coherent Non Uniform Memory Access
(ccNUMA): Memory is physically distributed but
appears as a single address space: Performance
(Bandwidth & Latency) is different for local and
remote memory access.
 Examples: AMD Opteron nodes, SGI Altix, Intel
Nehalem nodes – all modern multi-socket nodes

12. Distributed memory systems
 Pure distributed-memory parallel
computer
 No global cache-coherent shared
address space No Remote Memory
Access (NORMA)
 Data exchange between nodes:
Passing messages via network

13. Architecture of UMA
Architecture of
CCNUMA

14. Massively parallel
 Independent microprocessors that run in parallel
 Each processor has its own memory
 All processing elements are connected to form
one large computer
 A number of processors work on same task
 Examples : Blue Gene

15. clusters
 Completely independent computers combined to
a unified system through software and networking
 Components connected through fast LANs -
relies heavily on network speed
 Easily upgraded with addition of new systems
 Eg. 1100 Apple XServe G5 2.3 GHz dual-
processor machines (4 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA
HD) running Mac OS X and using Infinite Band
interconnect

16. Message passing interface
format

17. Top 5 super computers

18. conclusion
 Supercomputers of today are the
general purpose computers of tomorrow
 Many important applications need the
better main memory bandwidth and
computing power that are available only
in supercomputers