What is a Supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a computer that is among the largest, fastest or most powerful of the computers available. Late 2007 the fastest supercomputers operate on the order of more than 200 teraflops (that's computer lingo for trillions of operations per second!). And supercomputers are being improved all the time! Soon they will operate on the petaflop-scale (that's one quadrillion operations per second!).

This is a modern supercomputer. It is actually a cluster of numerous computers that are linked together to make them far more powerful. Courtesy of UCAR Digital Image Library.

NVIDIA® Tesla™ Personal Supercomputer

Desktop supercomputers became a reality today as Nvidia announced the release of its new GPU-based Tesla personal supercomputer.

The Tesla personal supercomputer is claimed to offer up to 250 times the performance of a standard PC or workstation, yet remains small enough to sit on an office desk and plug into a standard power strip. The Tesla personal supercomputer is made possible in part to Nvidia’s CUDA parallel computing architecture, where GPUs and CPUs work in tandem to greatly enhance the performance of complex, data-intensive computations.

At the heart of the new Tesla personal supercomputer are three or four Nvidia Tesla C1060 computing processors, which appear similar to a high-performance Nvidia graphics card, but without any video output ports. Each Tesla C1060 has 240 streaming processor cores running at 1.296 GHz, 4 GB of 800 MHz 512-bit GDDR3 memory and a PCI Express x16 system interface. While typically using only 160-watts of power, each card is capable of 933 GFlops of single precision floating point performance or 78 GFlops of double precision floating point performance.

While the Tesla C1060 computing processors are powerful, they have a massively-parallel architecture that may have trouble with serial computing modes. The Tesla personal supercomputer also features a powerful Intel or AMD quad-core processor, which is another important component of the system, especially when dealing with these serial computing modes. The Tesla personal supercomputer includes at least 4 GB of system memory per included Tesla C1060 card and at least a 1200- to 1350-watt power supply. System noise is rated at less than 45 dbA and the supported operating systems include Windows XP, Red Hat and SUSE.

It is pretty clear that the Tesla personal supercomputer is not designed for PC gaming, but rather for highly computational research and professional work. Ideal types of applications for this system would likely include the processing of large sets of consistent data, such as transcoding a DVD or studying seismic activity. The GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer is now available from retail HPC OEMs, system builders and resellers, including Dell, Asus, Western Scientific and Microway. Prices vary depending on configuration, but expect to pay around $10,000 for your own personal supercomputer.

NVIDIA® Tesla™ computing solutions enable the necessary transition to energy efficient parallel computing power. With 240 cores per processor and based on the revoluationary NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture, Tesla scales to solve the worlds most important computing challenges—more quickly and accurately. Video Courtessy YouTube.

Sources :

1. Nvidia Launches Tesla Personal Supercomputer
2. NVidia
3. windows.ucar.edu (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR))

IBM Research and five leading universities are partnering to create computing systems that are expected to simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.

That may sound like a scene from a low-budget, science-fiction movie, the one where a giant brain in a glass case is the central processing system for a futuristic society. But the IBM project, which has won $4.9 million in funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is very real.

IBM announced Thursday that its "Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing" (C2S2) project will attempt to design computing systems that "simulate and emulate the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition," while rivaling the brain's compact size and low power consumption.

IBM said the volume of digital data that computer systems have to process today is growing exponentially, while the ability of today's information technology to monitor, analyze and react to that information is lagging. Cognitive computing systems could "integrate and analyze vast amounts of data from many sources in the blink of an eye," IBM said in a statement.

For example, bankers must make split-second decisions based on constantly changing data that flows at an ever-dizzying rate. And in the business of monitoring the world’s water supply, a network of sensors and actuators constantly records and reports metrics such as temperature, pressure, wave height, acoustics and ocean tide.

The idea of building computers that mimic the human brain isn't new: Development of artificial intelligence technology is almost as old as computing itself. While aspects of AI have found their way into expert systems, pattern recognition applications and other technologies, AI has never quite lived up to its early hype.

The C2S2 project will include research over the next nine months in the areas of synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations and virtual environments, IBM said. Initially, the research will focus on developing nanoscale synapse-like devices that will link many computers around the world into a single "cognitive computer" in much the same way synapses in the human brain connect neurons or nerve cells.

IBM said C2S2's long-term goal is to develop "low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence." IBM said it recently assembled a system equivalent to the brain of a small mammal using cognitive computing algorithms and its BlueGene supercomputer.

Working with IBM on the project are noted researchers at Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, Columbia University Medical Center and the University of California-Merced.

DARPA awarded the funding as part of the first phase of its own Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative.

Sources :

1. ChannelWeb : IBM Developing Next-Gen Computer That Mimics Human Brain | By Rick Whiting, 1:51 PM EST Thu. Nov. 20, 2008.
2. InfoHighTech : IBM Seeks to Build the Computer of the Future Based on Insights From the Brain | jeudi 20 novembre 2008, par Bernard.

Fountain Valley CA, — November 19, 2008 — Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced it is shipping its high-capacity 64GB DataTraveler® 150 (DT150) USB Flash drive.

DT150 offers the largest capacity in Kingston’s entire line of DataTraveler USB drives and allows users the room and flexibility to backup important hard drive contents, and transport and share complete collections of music, videos, photos and documents in one convenient device.

DataTraveler 150 Product Features and Specifications :

• Capacities : 64GB, 32GB
• Dimensions : 3.06" x 0.9" x 0.47" (77.9mm x 22mm x 12.05mm)
• Operating Temperature : 32º F to 140º F (0º C to 60º C)
• Storage Temperature : -4º F to 185º F (-20º C to 85º C)
• Simple : Just plug into a USB port
• Convenient : Pocket-sized for easy transportability
• Guaranteed : Five-year warranty
• Compatible Operating Systems : Windows Vista (Windows ReadyBoost™ not supported), Windows XP (SP1, SP2), Windows 2000 (SP4), Mac OS X v.10.3.x and higher, Linux v.2.6.x and higher
  

For more information on Kingston or its products visit the Web site at: www.kingston.com


Sources :

1. Kingston : Kingston Technology Boosts DataTraveler 150 Capacity to 64GB