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	Supercomputer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research.
		Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience, although Cray Inc. still specializes in building supercomputers.
		In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Supercomputer (2225 words)

	Supercomputer (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks as weather forecasting climate research (including research into global warming) molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of compounds biological macromolecules polymers and crystals) physical (such as simulation of airplanes in wind simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons and research into nuclear fusion) cryptanalysis and the like.
		Their operating systems often variants of UNIX tend not to be as sophisticated those for smaller machines since supercomputers are dedicated to one task at a time than the multitude of simultaneous jobs that up the workload of smaller devices.
		The speed of a supercomputer is generally in flops (floating point operations per second); this ignores communication overheads and assumes that all of the machine are provided with data are working at full speed.
	www.freeglossary.com /Supercomputers (1719 words)

	CS 3604 Assignment 2: Supercomputers, Spring 1997
		There are three primary limits to performance at the supercomputer level: individual processor speed, the overhead involved in making large numbers of processors work together on a single task, and the input/output speed between processors and between processors and memory.
		Both problems had existed before, as most supercomputers had from two to sixteen processors, but they were much easier to deal with on that level than on the level of complexity arising from the use of hundreds or even thousands of processors.
		Supercomputers, on the other hand, were designed, built, and bought to work on extremely large jobs that could be handled by no other type of computing system.
	ei.cs.vt.edu /~history/SUPERCOM.Calle.HTML (2038 words)

	BBC World Home Page (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Supercomputers - everyone would love one but with a price tag of around $100 million each they're not easy to come by.
		It is, in fact, 1100 brand new Apple G5 towers placed side by side making it the world's most powerful homebuilt system, capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes.
		Arguably Virginia Tech has revolutionized the world of Supercomputing with a simplistic setup that can be duplicated around the globe by other institutions.
	www.bbcworld.com /content/clickonline_archive_40_2003.asp?pageid=666&co_pageid=3 (677 words)

	Supercomputers
		Supercomputers are used to solve problems that are too complex or too massive for standard computers, like calculating how individual molecules move in a tornado, or forecasting detailed weather patterns.
		The next generation of supercomputers (some of which are presently in the early stages of development) is predicted to break the petaflop level.
		Supercomputers that use thousands of Pentium Pro processors in a parallel configuration to meet the supercomputing demands of their customers.
	www.infoweblinks.com /content/supercomputers.htm (1100 words)

	Course Technology -- InfoWeb: Supercomputers
		Today, supercomputer technology is largely based on "super" versions of the same processors that you find in microcomputers.
		However, supercomputing power has been used to understand storm systems and track weather patterns--information that could be essential for protecting the world's food supply.
		This multimedia exhibit from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications demonstrates the use of supercomputing in radioastronomy, the study of fl holes, and virtual environments.
	www.cciw.com /content/supercomputers.html (363 words)

	PNNL News and Publications
		For example, the new supercomputer will enable scientists to study a larger group of hydrocarbons, in particular complex hydrocarbons, that are vital to gaining a complete understanding of the reaction mechanisms involved in hydrocarbon fuel combustion.
		Delivery of the supercomputer is scheduled to begin with the arrival of HP McKinley-based nodes in mid-2002 and conclude in 2003 with a final shipment of HP Madison-based systems.
		The supercomputer is based upon a Quadrics QSNet 2 interconnect that will provide a significantly reduced communication lag time between processors and will offer highly sustained performance—two factors crucial to computational chemistry research being done by PNNL.
	www.pnl.gov /news/2002/computer.htm (920 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Technology \| Nasa powers up with supercomputer
		Nasa said the supercomputer will help patch holes in its computing power limitations that were highlighted following the Columbia shuttle disaster in which seven astronauts were killed.
		Japan's Earth Simulator, for example, which is the fastest supercomputer in the world, took five years to get up and running, he said.
		The Project Columbia supercomputer's shared memory means a large problem or scenario can be worked on by all the processors simultaneously.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/technology/3532706.stm (692 words)

	What is supercomputer? - A Word Definition From the Webopedia Computer Dictionary
		Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for specialized applications that require immense amounts of mathematical calculations.
		Other uses of supercomputers include animated graphics, fluid dynamic calculations, nuclear energy research, and petroleum exploration.
		The chief difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe is that a supercomputer channels all its power into executing a few programs as fast as possible, whereas a mainframe uses its power to execute many programs concurrently.
	www.webopedia.com /TERM/S/supercomputer.html (570 words)

	Power Architecture Community Newsletter, 15 Feb 2005: MareNostrum: A new concept in Linux supercomputing
		The MareNostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, ranked number four in the world in speed in November 2004, is constructed of such totally off-the-shelf parts as IBM BladeCenter JS20 servers, 64-bit 970FX PowerPC processors, TotalStorage DS4100 storage servers, and Linux 2.6.
		MareNostrum is now at home at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) on the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) campus in Barcelona, a prestigious public institution focused on higher education, research, and technology transfer.
		The TOP500 Supercomputer Sites project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing -- twice a year, the project releases a list of the 500 sites operating the most powerful computer systems.
	www-128.ibm.com /developerworks/library/pa-nl3-marenostrum.html (1954 words)

	Review for the THES: The Supermen
		Customers for supercomputers, like those for supercars, have often basked in the prestige of owning the fastest computer in the world.
		CRAY-1 supercomputer, using early small-scale integrated circuit technology, housed in a distinctive and iconic circular case with seating for tired engineers!
		The future of supercomputing has to be increasing parallelization due to the physical limitations of sequential machines, and Cray recognized this.
	www.jpbowen.com /publications/thes-cray.html (1028 words)

	Welcome to FlashMobComputing.org
		Unlike traditional supercomputers, which are expensive and not accessible to the general public, a FlashMob supercomputer is temporary, made up of ordinary computers, and is built to work on a specific problem.
		Through a series of tests, we were able to run the benchmark on 256 of the computers and achieved a peak rate of 180 Gflops (billions of calculations per second), although this computation stopped three quarters of the way through due to a node failure.
		A FlashMob supercomputer is as much about the people who participate as it is about the technology they bring.
	www.flashmobcomputing.org (1295 words)

	The Office of Science - Oh My—It Does Fly! Fastest Unclassified Supercomputer in the West (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The PNNL system is the world's fastest supercomputer based on the Linux operating system and is the largest machine ever built using Intel's 64-bit architecture.
		The PNNL supercomputer is housed in the Molecular Science Computing Facility of the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE scientific user facility located at PNNL.
		Funding: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's 11.8-teraflop supercomputer is housed in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a national user facility supported by the DOE Office of Science's Biological and Environmental Research program.
	www.er.doe.gov /Science_News/feature_articles_2003/October/supercomputer/supercomputer.htm (893 words)

	New Scientist Breaking News - Flash mob supercomputer misses its target
		An ambitious attempt to build a makeshift supercomputer from hundreds of random laptops has missed its target of breaking into the list of the world's top 500 fastest machines.
		Many ordinary supercomputers are constructed by connecting relatively cheap servers or desktop computers together, but these normally use ultra-fast networking equipment to keep each machine synchronised with the rest.
		But a supercomputer requires processors to share hundreds of megabytes a second, which is what Witchel's software helped FlashMob to do.
	www.newscientist.com /article.ns?id=dn4851 (455 words)

	The TOP25 Supercomputer Sites
		This provides a general overview and pointers to further reading, on what the most powerful supercomputers on earth are actually used for.
		Generally under a ``site" we have combined supercomputers, which are installed in the same geographical location, and belong to the same organizational unit.
		An overview of many of the supercomputers in use is [7].
	www.hoise.com /primeur/PL/96/pl-top500/ES-PL-11-96-4.html (1081 words)

	Wired News: Mac Supercomputer Just Got Faster (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The latest test vaults Big Mac -- the first supercomputer made of Macs -- to the third slot among the world's Top 500 fastest machines, trailing Japan's Earth Simulator and Los Alamos National Laboratory's ASCI Q. The final rankings will be revealed in mid-November at the Supercomputer Conference.
		Whatever the final score, the Big Mac supercomputer is an astonishing achievement, one that is propelling Varadarajan to prominence in the supercomputing world.
		Strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s, the Big Mac is "arguably the cheapest supercomputer and is definitely the most powerful home-built supercomputer," Varadarajan said during a presentation at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference.
	www.wired.com /news/mac/0,2125,61005,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 (666 words)

	New Scientist Breaking News - Self-wiring supercomputer is cool and compact
		An experimental supercomputer made from hardware that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland.
		The FPGA supercomputer will be more powerful and efficient than a conventional system of similar physical size.
		This is fairly modest by modern supercomputing standards, as the fastest machines can operate at hundreds of teraflops.
	www.newscientist.com /article.ns?id=dn7448 (546 words)

	BBC NEWS \| Technology \| Apple powers college supercomputer
		Everyone would love a supercomputer but with a price tag of around $100m each they are not easy to come by.
		But in the United States staff and students at Virginia Tech have built one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for just $5m by plugging together hundreds of the latest computers from Apple.
		Arguably Virginia Tech has revolutionised the world of supercomputing with a simplistic setup that can be duplicated around the globe by other institutions.
	news.bbc.co.uk /1/hi/technology/3180872.stm (620 words)

	The New Yorker: From the Archives (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The brothers claim that m zero is a “true, general-purpose supercomputer,” and that it is as fast and powerful as a somewhat older Cray Y-MP, but it is not as fast as the latest of the Y-MP machines, the C90, an advanced supercomputer made by Cray Research.
		M zero is a parallel supercomputer, a type of machine that has lately come to dominate the avant-garde in supercomputer architecture, because the design offers succulent possibilities for speed in solving problems.
		The definition of a supercomputer is simply this: one of the fastest and most powerful scientific computers in the world for its time.
	www.newyorker.com /archive/content/?050411fr_archive01 (16122 words)

	BBC - Science & Nature - Hot Topics - Artificial Intelligence (AI)
		The world's most powerful supercomputer can carry out 100 trillion operations per second, which some scientists believe could be approaching the processing power of the human brain.
		A supercomputer with double this processing power is expected within the next two years.
		HAL, the supercomputer that rebels against its human handlers in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), is a cheeky reference to IBM.
	www.bbc.co.uk /science/hottopics/ai (757 words)

	IBM Research \| Projects \| Blue Gene
		Compared with today's fastest supercomputers, it will be six times faster, consume 1/15th the power per computation and be 10 times more compact than today's fastest supercomputers.
		Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the frontiers in supercomputing: in computer architecture, in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.
		Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project dedicated to building a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems.
	www.research.ibm.com /bluegene (890 words)

	Supercomputer (Linktionary term) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Supercomputers are the fastest and most expensive computer systems.
		Supercomputers are generally designed for special applications (e.g., predicting weather or modeling of nuclear weapons explosions).
		They are usually owned by governments, academic institutions, research groups, and companies with special analytical requirements such as Celera Genomics, which mapped the human genome.
	www.linktionary.com /s/supercomputer.html (160 words)

	Apple - Science - Profile - Virginia Tech, p.1
		Ranking seventh in the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful computer systems, System X was built at a fifth of the cost of the second-least expensive system in the top 10.
		“When we built the first supercomputer from Power Mac G5s, we proved that a radically-different communications technology could be used to create a large-scale computing platform,” says Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan, director of the university’s Terascale Computing Facility and the system’s lead designer.
		The Xserve-based supercomputer is part of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, where scientists tackle multi-disciplinary, “grand challenge” problems in science and engineering —; large-scale problems such as computational fluid dynamics, molecular modeling, nanoelectronics, quantum chemistry, computational biology and large-scale network emulation.
	www.apple.com /science/profiles/vatech2 (683 words)

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