Supercomputers: Now Less Super, More Computer

Tag : Hardware Assortment

The last time the world got so excited about supercomputers was in1996 when a machine built by Intel and Sandia National Labs called ASCI Red breached the 1-teraflop level. But Teraflops are so 20th century,for now we’re getting jazzed up about IBM’s $100million Roadrunner computer, which recently broke the petaflopbarrier to become the fastest supercomputer…ever.
Something about big, round numbers excites the computing world anda petaflop, which is a measure of how fast a computer can completean operation, is pretty big and round. The technologyindustry’s excitement around Roadrunner and ASCI Red isunderstandable — they both signaled a big shift insupercomputing — from its core technologies to the tasks wassupposed to do.
ASCI Red , with its multi-core x86 processors, signaled the future of thesupercomputing industry as the computers moved away from aglamorous assortment of specialty-built processors crammed intocustom cabinets running Unix. Almost a decade earlier it was a Cray computer in 1988 that beat the 1-gigaflop record .
As a general rule, supercomputers increase in performance 1,000times every decade, although factors on the software side may limitgrowth in years to come.
Short History of Modern SuperComputer
Cray’s first supercomputer, which marked the beginning of theindustry as we know it, was installed in 1976 and ran at 160 megaflops . It cost $8.8 million. Like IBM’s Roadrunner, it wasinstalled at Los Alamos National Lab. It was the first to run onintegrated circuits and was shaped like a “C” to keepthe twisted pair connecting the processors from being too long andcausing too much latency.
In 1982, Cray introduced the first multiprocessor architecture forsupercomputers. The processing power in that first Cray is lessthan the several gigaflops most cheap PCs can run today.
That’s a common theme in supercomputing, as yesterday’ssupercomputers become today’s cloud compute grids and theclusters of servers running a hedge fund’s algorithmictrading strategies.
The line between supercomputing, which was geared at solvingscientific problems, and high-performance computing, which requiredbulk processing power and less refinement, has blurred. Manysupercomputers have been lumped in with high performance computing,and because both can use commodity hardware and open-sourcesoftware, their sky-high pricing has fallen.
Earlier this year, that led research firm IDC to shift its marketdata a bit and compress supercomputing and the high-performancecomputing systems costing more than $500,000 into the samecategory. That category, by the way, grew 24 percent last year to $3.2 billion . But since the rise of clustered computing back in 2002, mostsupercomputers have become less super and more like regularcomputers.
Unix lost out as an operating system around 2004 when more than half of the computers in the Top 500 list ran Linux . Instead of the closely linked twisted pair of Cray’ssystem, today’s supercomputers use Infiniband. Some of themcan still costs millions to build, but when all is said and done,most are built on x86 processors running Linux.
Cell Side Computing & Beyond x86
The rise of the x86 architecture is one of the reasons Cray formed a partnership with Intel . There was a desire for a second source of chips after AMD’sproduction delays caused Cray a financial hiccup, but also arealization by Intel that supercomputing was now a growing marketdominated by its processors.
In Nov. 2007, 71 percent of the Top 500 supercomputers containedIntel chips. Ten years ago that number was 2.6 percent, and fiveyears ago it was 11 percent. The x86 trend and democratization ofsupercomputing is also a boon to makers of HPC systems, such asRackable and Appro.
But the Crays of the world may not stand on ceremony for Intel orAMD very long. IBM’s newly launched Roadrunner, the fastestsupercomputer working today (supercomputers have shorter heydaysthan a viral video star), runs on a combination of AMD’s x86and IBM’s Cell processors connected using Infiniband.
One of the reasons Roadrunner is so unique is that IBM had todevelop special software that would work with both types ofprocessors. The Cell architecture was designed for the PlayStationand is now morphing into a performance chip for other applications, a process that IBM is likely to follow in the future .
Supercomputers comprised of specialized processors are an emergingtrend in the high-performance computing world, with players such asNvidia bragging about its ability to crunch scientific data faster than general purpose CPUs.
So far, a Nvidia-powered supercomputer hasn’t broken the Top 500, but Steve Conway, IDC researchvice president for HPC, says such different architectures mightbecome more important in the next few years. If it does, it will beworth watching, because trends in supercomputing generally trickledownstream to the rest of the computer-using population eventually.