Supercomputers

A little introduction to supercomputers, with some of history

A supercomputer is the type of computer most powerful and fastest available at this time. How are you machines are designed to process huge amounts of information in a short time and are dedicated to a specific task, its application or use of the individual escapes rather engage in:
1. Search oilfield seismic large databases.
2. The study and prediction of tornadoes.
3. The study and prediction of anywhere in the world.
4. The development of models and projects the creation of aircraft, flight simulators.

We must also add that the supercomputers are a relatively new technology, so their use is not overcrowded and is sensitive to changes. It is for this reason that the price is very high with over 30 million dollars and the number of production per year is small. Supercomputers are the sort of more powerful computers and faster than existing in a given time. Are large, the largest among its peers. Can process huge amounts of information in a short time and can perform millions of instructions per second, are aimed at a specific task and have a very large storage capacity. They are also the most expensive having a costoque can exceed $ 30 million. Because of its high cost are produced very little for a year, there are even some that are made only on request.

They have a special temperature control in order to dissipate the heat that some components can reach. It acts as the arbiter of all applications and controls access to all files, so does the input and output operations. The user is directed to the organization's central computer processing support when required.
They are designed for multiprocessing systems, the CPU is the processing center and can support thousands of users online. The number of processors that can have a supercomputer depends mainly on the model, can have from about 16 to 512 processors (such as the NEC SX-4 1997) and more.


The Manchester Mark I
The first supercomputer British laid the foundation for many concepts still used today.
The digital world's first computer, electronic and program-loaded (top figure) successfully executed its first program on June 21, 1948. This program was written by Tom Kilburn who, along with the late FC (Freddie) Williams designed and built the Manchester Mark I computer This machine, the prototype Mark I, quickly became known as' The Baby Machine 'or just `The Baby'.
In modern terms The Baby had a RAM (random access memory) for only 32 positions or 'words'. Each word consisting of 32 bits (binary digits), which means that the machine had a total of 1024 bits of memory.
The RAM technology was based on cathode ray tube (CRT). CRTs were used to store data bits as charged areas on the phosphor screen, showing as an incandescent series of dots on it. The CRT's electron beam can efficiently handle this load and write a 1 or 0 and then read it as requested. Freddie Williams led the investigation that perfected the use of CRT storage with Tom Kilburn made decisive contributions.

The Cray 1
The Cray 1 was the first supercomputer "modern".
The first Cray-1 in England was located at Daresbury Laboratory for two years before being moved to the University of London.
The first major success in the design of a modern supercomputer was the Cray-1 which was introduced in 1976. One reason why the Cray-1 was so successful was that I could make more than one hundred million arithmetic operations per second (100 MFLOP / s). It was designed by Seymour Cray who left Control Data Corporation in 1970 to create his own company called Cray Research Inc., founded in 1972. If you today, following a conventional process, you will try to find a computer in the same speed using PCs, you would need to connect 200 of them, or you could just buy 33 Sun4s. Cray Reasearch Inc. made at least 16 of its fabulous Cray 1. A typical Cray-1 in 1976 cost over 700,000 dollars. The good thing is that you could instruct the machine in any color deseases, which still remains.

IBM - SP2 computer
The IBM SP2 installed on the Daresbury Laboratory, has, since an upgrade this year, 24 nodes P2SC (Super Chip), plus another 2 processors width oldest node located in two racks. Only the second of which is shown in the picture. Each node has a clock of 120 MHz and 128 Mbytes of memory. Two New High Performance Switch (TV3) are used to connect nodes together. Data storage is 40 GB of fast disk locally attached Ethernet and FDDI networks for user access.
An individual maximum node performance of 480 Mflops offers a total of over 12 Gflops for the entire machine.
A workstation is connected to PowerPC RS/6000 SP2 system for monitoring and management of hardware and software.

Bibliography:
http://www.monografias.com/trabajos65/supercomputadoras/supercomputadoras1.shtml
http://roberto.4mg.com/historia.htm
http://conecti.ca/2011/08/15/infografia-historia-de-las-supercomputadoras/