A Supercomputer in Every Chip

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

May 10, 2004

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The once-quiet supercomputer industry has been revived by the development of supercomputer clusters based on commodity chips. At the same time, traditional supercomputer companies like Cray are making a comeback with supercomputers based on powerful vector CPUs. Together, these new, less expensive types of supercomputers have put the technology within reach of new users, and fueled demand by governments and large industries for supercomputers to conduct complex tasks such as nuclear weapons simulations, pharmaceutical drug modeling, intensive data mining of large data sets, and geological oil modeling.

In addition, grid computing has become popular as a way to link multiple machines so that they can function as a distributed supercomputer. Grid computing is useful primarily for tasks that can be easily broken into sub-problems that can be solved by individual machines, providing answers that can be combined with other results. This approach doesn't work for many supercomputer problems, but it does work for some.

These last three years in supercomputing have been quite a change. Jack Dongarra, Director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory and a professor at the University of Tennessee, says "for a while things were not very exciting, but things have changed." This is because of "the advancements in microprocessoring and because we now know how to better use parallel processing."

In addition, competition among governments to sponsor the fastest supercomputers, which contribute to advancements in scientific and military research, has sparked development of increasingly powerful supercomputers. Dongarra comments, "It's not just the United States and Japan; all countries are developing supercomputing because of clustering's low cost and high performance."

Attesting to supercomputing's new popularity, SC2003, the supercomputing conference and exhibition in Phoenix, AZ, had its highest attendance ever with 7,641 registered attendees, and turned away 50 companies because the exhibition hall ran out of space.

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