Mini Computer

Introduction

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We all probably heard of supercomputers. But when you think of a supercomputer do you think of HAL2000, and other Science Fiction stuff? Right!

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Unlike mainframes and minicomputers. Super computers are used for the heavy stuff like weather maps, construction of atom bombs, finding oil, earthquake prediction, and sciences where a lot of calculations have to be done. They also are used to help governments eavesdrop on anything there is passing through telephone, data lines, e-mail, radio waves, anything that is written etc. etc.

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As you can see in the table the ranking of a supercomputer is at the top of the computer spectrum.

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Historically, a supercomputer is associated with the fastest computer available. Sometimes also the largest in size. Supercomputing stands for: "mass computing at ultra high speed".

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Definition

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Many definitions(2) of supercomputers have come and gone. Some favorites of the past are

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any computer costing more than ten million dollars,

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any computer whose performance is limited by input/output (I/O) rather than by the CPU,

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any computer that is ?only one? generation behind what you really need, and so on.

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In general a supercomputer performs ?above normal computing,? in the sense that a superstar is ?above? the other stars. And, yes you can build your own personal super computer. In a later chapter on "Grid" computing this will be explained. Note, that ?super-anything? does not mean the absolute fastest or best.

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Though all contemporary personal computers perform in the tens or hundreds of megaflops (millions of calculations per second), they still can not solve certain problems fast enough. It is only in the beginning of 2000 that the supercomputing arena moves into the gigaflops region. What this means is that you can have a computer calculate problems at the speed of a few gigaflops, but doing the same calculations at "just" 100 megaflops and within acceptable time too is almost impossible. Meaning, with supercomputers you can do calculations within a time limit or session that is acceptable to the user. Namely: YOU.

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To put it stronger: you can do anything in real time (meaning: now, right away, immediately) with a supercomputer that cannot be done in your lifetime with one single PC.

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screen dump of NEC's ESS

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So, certain tasks are, in some ways, not possible to do in real time on PCs.(2) For example it will take a single PC more than a few days (weeks) to calculate a weather map. Resulting in the predictions of the weather several days old when the map is finished. That doesn't sound much like a prediction, does it? A supercomputer does the same job in a few minutes. That's more like what we as users want: top speed.

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The issue of costs and time

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Construction of supercomputers is an awesome and very expensive task. To get a machine from the laboratory to the market may take several years. The most recent development costs of supercomputers may vary between 150 to 500 million dollars or more. You can imagine that a project like that draws on all the resources a company has. One of the major reasons that the development of a supercomputer is kept very hush hush. The latest supers are only possible to create with help of governments and one or more large size companies.

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Using a supercomputer is expensive as well. And as a user you are charged according to the time you use the system what is expressed in the number of processor (CPU) seconds your program runs. In the recent past Cray (one of the first supercomputers) time was $1,000 per hour. The use of this "Cray time" was a very common way to express computer costs in time and dollars.

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The need

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Why do we need a supercomputer? Well as a normal person from the street you don't. Though your cell phone or PDA has more computing power than the first mainframes like the ENIAC or Mark1. So with the information glut flooding your senses, and the bloating software trying to channel that, we will probably need extreme computing power in maybe a few decades. The architecture in creating that power is already on the horizon: wireless LANs, info bot technology, grid computing and virtual computing centers thus shared computing etc etc. will be part of our daily used equipment. Even computers will be sewn into our clothing. (See MIT's wearable computing project)

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Who really needs supercomputing today are mostly scientists. Doing whatever they do in mass computing at ultra high speed. They use such computers in all thinkable disciplines: space exploration and related imagery (picturing galaxies and intergalactic matter), environmental simulations (global warming effects) mathematics, physics (the search for the really smallest part of matter), gene technology (what gen is it that makes us old) and there are many other examples.

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More real world examples are: industrial and technological applications, world spanning financial and economical systems in which speed is essential. Also more and more supercomputers are used for creating simulations for building airplanes, creating new chemical substances, new materials, testing car crashes without having to crash a car. And many more applications where it will take more than a few days to get the results or are impossible to calculate.

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Chronology

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Below follows a short narrative on how supercomputers evolved from mainframes and alike. Again the need to develop supers did not come out of the blue. Government and private companies alike acted on the need of the market. The need to bring down the costly computer time and to calculate as fast as possible to save time thus money. The latter is not always the primary reason.

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