What makes a computer super? Is it the ability to fly? Is it laser eyes?
Perhaps invulnerability to bolts? Nah, man. This is computers we're talking
about. They're super fast and great for complex simulations, crypt analysis,
resource exploration, weather forecasting, and all kinds of amazing
stuff. But first, a bit of history. According to the authoritative source on
absolutely everything, the first computer to earn the super prefix was
designed by Seymour Cray and released in 1964.
It was about 10 times faster than all other computers at the time. And CDC,
the company for which Cray worked before leaving to start his own, sold a hundred
of them at $8 million each. Now early
supercomputers well for about 30 years actually I guess relied on designs with
just a few powerful specialized processing cores but in order to keep up
with the everinccreasing demand for more power the approach has shifted starting
in the '90s towards many offtheshelf
processing cores with modern supercomputers containing even hundreds
of thousands of processing cores some of them traditional CPUs and some of them
actually GPUs which can be very efficient for certain workloads. Now,
hold on a second there, Lionus question. CPUs and GPUs in these things, just like
my gaming rig. Yes, but on a much larger
scale. The Titan supercomput has over 18,000
16 coropteron processors and over 18,000
Tesla K20X GPUs. All right, then Lionus.
Two more questions. How do they power and cool that sucker? And can it run
Crisis? Power and cooling are pretty much handled by the system designer on a
case-byase basis. But the main theme is with as little waste as possible because
a supercomput can consume as much power as thousands of individual homes and
cost millions of dollars a year to operate. Titan uses 480 volt electrical
power to allow thinner gauge cables, saving about a million dollars in copper
during construction. The IBM Aquazar system actually recycles the water
cooling fluid that's used to cool the processors to heat buildings. And Intel
and 3M showed off an inert fluid submersion concept earlier this year
that looks bananas. As for Crisis, very
funny, but no. Most supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems that are
heavily customized to best leverage the architecture of their own exact hardware
design and to keep intersystem communication as fast as possible for
optimal efficiency. This is what allows these extravagant designs to work so
cohesively to complete a single task and unlock new computing paradigms that were
impossible or at least impractical with previous hardware. But high-speed
light-based interconnects between ginormous racks of modules isn't the
only way to achieve supercomputer level performance, usually measured in flops
or floatingoint operations per second with the limpact benchmark. If your work
can be broken up into small chunks to be crunched as part of a larger project,
then distributed or grid computing is another option where each processor
might be in a laptop or even a phone
belonging to an individual that calculates everything and then submits
the results back to a central system. This is how volunteer projects like
folding at home, which allows regular Joe Schmoes to contribute to protein
folding research for Stanford University work. And all it costs for each person
is a few bucks on their monthly electric bill. Speaking of your electric bill,
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and shaving money. Guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked
it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment letting me know if you have suggestions for future fastest possibles
just like this one. And as always, don't forget to share the video and subscribe
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