Super Computers

Personal

Chris WardCS147 Fall 2008

Recent offerings from NVIDA show that small companies or even individuals can now afford and own Super Computers.

Just what is a “Super Computer”?

“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.

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. )

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.

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

GPU Graphics Processing Unit CPU Central Processing unit

Device Transistor Count Year ReleasedMaker

RV770 956 000 000 2008AMD

GT200 1 400 000 000 2008NVIDIA

Dual-Core Itanium 2 1 700 000 000 2006Intel

Quad-Core Itanium Tukwila 2 000 000 000 2008Intel

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

•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

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS http://www.top500.org/list/2008/11/100 http://www.top500.org/project/linpack http://www.nvidia.com/object/

personal_supercomputing.html http://www.cgarena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?

p=60618 http://www.nvidia.com/object/

product_tesla_s1070_us.html http://www.hpcwire.com/features/17885244.html http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/

item-details.asp?EdpNo=4259469&CatId=4044