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Comparison of supercomputing over the last 10 years

Section 1.1.4 Supercomputers

Overview

Supercomputing has become a very important part of many fields. These include industry, scientific, defense, and academia. Over the last 10 years there has been a noticeable shift from the vector processing supercomputers and the massively parallel processing (MPP) model and a move toward the cluster. The main reason for this is based on cost. A vector processor is a specialty piece of equipment and companies must "tool" up in order to produce such a processor. With the MPP a company uses a specialty processor that is produced in greater numbers, but is still expensive. With the cluster a developer can produce a very fast and reliable system with common off the shelf technology or COTS for short. Over the last 10 years the trend for the top500 has shown that these cluster systems are becoming more popular and faster then their specialty counterparts.

Current Trend

That trend in supercomputing is going in the direction of the grid. These can be broken up into two types with a very small difference. Clustered computing, which involves many small systems usually with 1 processor, linked together with some sort of high speed network interface. This is generally gigabit ethernet or infiniband. A good example of a cluster supercomputer would be the NCSA Dell PowerEdge 1955 cluster that they built. There is also the constellation. This involves taking smaller systems with 2 or more processors and linking them together with some sort of high speed interface. Again this can be either gigabit ethernet or it can be infiniband. An example of the constellation system would be the Telecom Italia HP Superdome875 HyperPlex. The trend from 1997 until the current year on the top 500 has started to overwhelmingly favor the cluster. The reason for this is because of the cost involved.