High Performance Computing

Introduction

High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.

Overview

The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research. A related term, high-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). Recently, HPC has come to be applied to business uses of cluster-based supercomputers, such as data warehouses, line-of-business (LOB) applications, and transaction processing.

High-performance computing (HPC) is a term that arose after the term "supercomputing." HPC is sometimes used as a synonym for supercomputing; but, in other contexts, "supercomputer" is used to refer to a more powerful subset of "high-performance computers," and the term "supercomputing" becomes a subset of "high-performance computing." The potential for confusion over the use of these terms is apparent.

Top 500

A list of the most powerful high-performance computers can be found below. The TOP500 list ranks the world's 500 fastest high-performance computers, as measured by the HPL benchmark. Not all computers are listed, either because they are ineligible (e.g., they cannot run the HPL benchmark) or because their owners have not submitted a HPL score (e.g., because they do not wish the size of their system to become public information). In addition, the use of the single Linpack benchmark is controversial, in that no single measure can test all aspects of a high-performance computer. To help overcome the limitations of the Linpack test, the U.S. government commissioned one of its originators, Dr. Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, to create a suite of benchmark tests that includes Linpack and others, called the HPC Challenge benchmark suite. This evolving suite has been used in some HPC procurements, but, because it is not reducible to a single number, it has been unable to overcome the publicity advantage of the less useful TOP500 Linpack test. The TOP500 list is updated twice a year, once in June at the ISC European Supercomputing Conference and again at a US Supercomputing Conference in November. Many ideas for the new wave of grid computing were originally borrowed from HPC.

History

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL, a portable implementation of the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark for distributed-memory computers.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The list is updated twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputer Conference in June, the second one is presented in November at the IEEE Super Computer Conference in the USA.

Systems Ranked #1 since 1993

List of supercomputers (by name and year) ranked #1 since 1993
• IBM Roadrunner (since June 2008)
• IBM Blue Gene/L (November 2004 – June 2008)
• NEC Earth Simulator (June 2002 – November 2004)
• IBM ASCI White (November 2000 – June 2002)
• Intel ASCI Red (June 1997 – November 2000)
• Hitachi CP-PACS (November 1996 – June 1997)
• Hitachi SR2201 (June 1996 – November 1996)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (November 1994 – June 1996)
• Intel Paragon XP/S140 (June 1994 – November 1994)
• Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel (November 1993 – June 1994)
• TMC CM-5 (June 1993 – November 1993)

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