Supercomputers as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
744 words · ~3 min read
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What makes a computer super? Is it the ability to fly? Is it laser eyes?
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Perhaps invulnerability to bolts? Nah, man. This is computers we're talking
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about. They're super fast and great for complex simulations, crypt analysis,
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resource exploration, weather forecasting, and all kinds of amazing
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stuff. But first, a bit of history. According to the authoritative source on
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absolutely everything, the first computer to earn the super prefix was
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designed by Seymour Cray and released in 1964.
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It was about 10 times faster than all other computers at the time. And CDC,
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the company for which Cray worked before leaving to start his own, sold a hundred
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of them at $8 million each. Now early
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supercomputers well for about 30 years actually I guess relied on designs with
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just a few powerful specialized processing cores but in order to keep up
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with the everinccreasing demand for more power the approach has shifted starting
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in the '90s towards many offtheshelf
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processing cores with modern supercomputers containing even hundreds
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of thousands of processing cores some of them traditional CPUs and some of them
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actually GPUs which can be very efficient for certain workloads. Now,
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hold on a second there, Lionus question. CPUs and GPUs in these things, just like
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my gaming rig. Yes, but on a much larger
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scale. The Titan supercomput has over 18,000
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16 coropteron processors and over 18,000
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Tesla K20X GPUs. All right, then Lionus.
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Two more questions. How do they power and cool that sucker? And can it run
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Crisis? Power and cooling are pretty much handled by the system designer on a
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case-byase basis. But the main theme is with as little waste as possible because
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a supercomput can consume as much power as thousands of individual homes and
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cost millions of dollars a year to operate. Titan uses 480 volt electrical
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power to allow thinner gauge cables, saving about a million dollars in copper
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during construction. The IBM Aquazar system actually recycles the water
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cooling fluid that's used to cool the processors to heat buildings. And Intel
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and 3M showed off an inert fluid submersion concept earlier this year
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that looks bananas. As for Crisis, very
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funny, but no. Most supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems that are
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heavily customized to best leverage the architecture of their own exact hardware
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design and to keep intersystem communication as fast as possible for
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optimal efficiency. This is what allows these extravagant designs to work so
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cohesively to complete a single task and unlock new computing paradigms that were
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impossible or at least impractical with previous hardware. But high-speed
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light-based interconnects between ginormous racks of modules isn't the
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only way to achieve supercomputer level performance, usually measured in flops
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or floatingoint operations per second with the limpact benchmark. If your work
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can be broken up into small chunks to be crunched as part of a larger project,
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then distributed or grid computing is another option where each processor
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might be in a laptop or even a phone
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belonging to an individual that calculates everything and then submits
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the results back to a central system. This is how volunteer projects like
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folding at home, which allows regular Joe Schmoes to contribute to protein
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folding research for Stanford University work. And all it costs for each person
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and shaving money. Guys, thanks for watching. Like this video if you liked
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it. Dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment letting me know if you have suggestions for future fastest possibles
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just like this one. And as always, don't forget to share the video and subscribe
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and all that good youtuby