Types Of Supercomputers

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Special-purpose supercomputers:

Special-purpose supercomputers are high-performance computing devices with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom VLSI chips, allowing higher price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. They are used for applications such as astrophysics computation and brute-force codebreaking. Historically a new special-purpose supercomputer has occasionally been faster than the world's fastest general-purpose supercomputer, by some measure. For example, GRAPE-6 was faster than the Earth Simulator in 2002 for a particular special set of problems.

Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:

* Deep Blue, for playing chess
* Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of machines
* GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
* Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher

The fastest supercomputers today

Measuring supercomputer speed

The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (1012 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-, combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (1015 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.) This measurement is based on a particular benchmark which does LU decomposition of a large matrix. This mimics a class of real-world problems, but is significantly easier to compute than a majority of actual real-world problems

Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the Top500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is the best current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time.

Current fastest supercomputer system
A BlueGene/P node card
A BlueGene/P node card

As of November 2007, the IBM Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 478.2 TFLOPS.

On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer. These computers can sustain one PFLOPS. IBM has announced that several customers will install these systems later in 2007. One of these is likely to become the fastest deployed supercomputer at that time.

The MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer, which was completed in June 2006, reportedly reached one PFLOPS calculation speed, though it may not qualify as a general-purpose supercomputer as its specialized hardware is optimized for molecular dynamics simulations.

Quasi-supercomputing:

Some types of large-scale distributed computing for embarrassingly parallel problems take the clustered supercomputing concept to an extreme.

One such example is the BOINC platform, a host for a number of distributed computing projects. On March 16, 2008, BOINC recorded a processing power of over 960 TFLOPS through over 550,000 active computers on the network. The largest project, SETI@home, reported processing power of over 450 TFLOPS through almost 350,000 active computers.

Another distributed computing project, Folding@home, reported nearly 1.3 PFLOPS of processing power in late September 2007. A little over 1 PFLOPS of this processing power is contributed by clients running on PlayStation 3 systems.

GIMPS's distributed Mersenne Prime search achieves currently 27 TFLOPS (as of March 2008).

Google's search engine system may be faster with estimated total processing power of between 126 and 316 TFLOPS. The New York Times estimates that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers.