When supercomputers and/or supercomputers become high-performance computers designation, which operate at the time of their introduction in the highest realizable capacity range. A typical characteristic of a supercomputer is its large number of processors, which access a very large main storage.

For quite some time are established increases so-called cluster, with which a large number from (usually inexpensive) single computers to a large computer are interlaced.

Closely connected with the term supercomputer is the company Cray. It is designated after its founder Seymour Cray and manufactured the first supercomputers into the 1970er years. The first officially installed supercomputer Cray-1 created 1976 130 MegaFLOPS.Zum comparison, a normal PC can nowadays several giga floating-point operations per second implement.

The fastest supercomputers are specified half-yearly in the Top-500 list. As basis of evaluation that serves Linpack bench mark.

Targeted application of supercomputers

The manufacturing costs of a supercomputer from the TOP10 move at present in a very high two digit often already three-figure euro-amount of millions. Thereby no borders are set upward. For the new supercomputer within the range around 10 PFLOPS, in planning, nearly 700 million euro are estimated at present. With these enormous investment sums inevitably the question arises for which these very expensive devices is needed and whether the investment pays into the development of such an equipment, except for pure prestige reasons.

The today's supercomputers are used predominantly for simulation purposes. An per close-to-reality simulation of complex connections, the more arithmetic performance usually one needs. In addition the advantage of the supercomputers is that they can consider more interdependences by their extremely fast and large arithmetic performance ever. This permits thus an including to ever more far-reaching often also inconspicuous secondary or Randbedingungnen for actual simulation and ensures thereby a ever more meaningful total result.

The present main operational areas of the supercomputers cover thereby the ranges:

• Biology
• Chemistry
• Geology
• Air and space travel
• Medicine
• Weather and climatic research
• Military
• Physics

Up to the military, which mainly military planning games it operates the ranges mark themselves by the fact that it concerns very complex systems and/or subsystems, which in extensive measure are linked with one another. So changes in the subsystem have usually more or less strong effects on neighbouring or attached systems. By the use of supercomputers it will consider ever more easily possible many of such consequences or will even prognosticate, whereby already far in the apron any counter measures could be met. This applies e.g. with Simulationen to the climatic change, the forecasts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions as well as in the medicine with the simulation of new active substances on Organismus.Die enormous Investitionsummen into the constant increase of the FLOPS and thus the development from ever faster supercomputers particularly with the use advantages and the possible "„knowledge projection/lead "“to mankind is justified, less from the aspects of the general technical progress.

Selected supercomputers

world-wide (conditions 2005)

Germany far

Achievements of supercomputers

(in the broader sense)

• to the comparison: the Earth simulator could accomplish all computations of all computers world-wide from 1960 to 1970 in approximately 35 minutes.
• in an accepted bar chart, in which 1 millimeter of bar length stands for 100 megaflops, the appropriate bar for 100 TeraFLOPS would be 1 kilometer large.
• Deep Blue 2 (high-performance computers of IBM) strikes as first computers a chess world champion in an official duel.
• Yasumasa Canada determines the circle number of pi with a Hitachi SR8000 of the University of Tokyo on 1.24 trillion places exactly.

Related links

• TOP500 list of the highest performance supercomputers
• The internationally Conference for High Performance Computing and Communications
• International conference of supercomputer in Heidelberg
• Chemnitzer Linux cluster (CLIC)
• Kepler cluster at the University of
• '' BEEP, BEEP! Trio of chases computing more roadrunner ''

Articles in category "Supercomputer"

We found here 18 articles.

Related Websites

We found here 5 related websites.

• Cray Inc - The Supercomputer Company
  Official site for the supercomputers company. Includes details of products, job opportunities, and...


• San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
  The central nexus for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. Publications,...


• Supercomputer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, ... He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, ...


• Top 500 Supercomputers
  Ranking of supercomputers according to the LINPACK benchmark. Links to news articles.


• TOP500 Supercomputer Sites
  TOP500 Supercomputer Sites ... Introduction and Objectives · The Linpack Benchmark · TOP500 Description · TOP500 Supercomputer - current list ...