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A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=November 2014 )〕 Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially, and for decades primarily, by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm. Since its introduction in June 2013, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer is currently the fastest in the world at 33.86 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS), or 33.86 quadrillions of FLOPS. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). Throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis. Systems with massive numbers of processors generally take one of the two paths: in one approach (e.g., in distributed computing), a large number of discrete computers (e.g., laptops) distributed across a network (e.g., the Internet) devote some or all of their time to solving a common problem; each individual computer (client) receives and completes many small tasks, reporting the results to a central server which integrates the task results from all the clients into the overall solution.〔(DesktopGrid )〕 In another approach, a large number of dedicated processors are placed in close proximity to each other (e.g. in a computer cluster); this saves considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for the processors to work together (rather than on separate tasks), for example in mesh and hypercube architectures. The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging trend; one can think of this as a small cluster (the multicore processor in a smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) that both depends upon and contributes to the cloud.〔''Performance Modelling and Optimization of Memory Access on Cellular Computer Architecture Cyclops64'' K Barner, GR Gao, Z Hu, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005, Volume 3779, Network and Parallel Computing, Pages 132–143〕〔''Analysis and performance results of computing betweenness centrality on IBM Cyclops64'' by Guangming Tan, Vugranam C. Sreedhar and Guang R. Gao The Journal of Supercomputing Volume 56, Number 1, 1–24 September 2011〕 ==History== (詳細はAtlas at the University of Manchester and a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC), designed by Seymour Cray. These used innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance.〔''Hardware software co-design of a multimedia SOC platform'' by Sao-Jie Chen, Guang-Huei Lin, Pao-Ann Hsiung, Yu-Hen Hu 2009 ISBN pages 70-72〕 The Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and the Manchester University and was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, about one million instructions per second. The first Atlas was officially commissioned on 7 December 1962 as one of the world's first supercomputers considered to be the most powerful computer in the world at that time by a considerable margin, and equivalent to four IBM 7094s. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, was designed by Cray to be the fastest in the world. Cray switched from use of germanium to silicon transistors, which could run very fast, solving the overheating problem by introducing refrigeration.〔''The Supermen'', Charles Murray, Wiley & Sons, 1997.〕 Given that the 6600 outperformed all the other contemporary computers by about 10 times, it was dubbed a ''supercomputer'' and defined the supercomputing market when one hundred computers were sold at $8 million each.〔''A history of modern computing'' by Paul E. Ceruzzi 2003 ISBN 978-0-262-53203-7 page 161 ()〕〔 Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company, Cray Research. Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it became one of the most successful supercomputers in history.〔''Readings in computer architecture'' by Mark Donald Hill, Norman Paul Jouppi, Gurindar Sohi 1999 ISBN 978-1-55860-539-8 page 41-48〕〔''Milestones in computer science and information technology'' by Edwin D. Reilly 2003 ISBN 1-57356-521-0 page 65〕 The Cray-2 released in 1985 was an 8 processor liquid cooled computer and Fluorinert was pumped through it as it operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest until 1990.〔''Parallel computing for real-time signal processing and control'' by M. O. Tokhi, Mohammad Alamgir Hossain 2003 ISBN 978-1-85233-599-1 pages 201–202〕 While the supercomputers of the 1980s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear both in the United States and Japan, setting new computational performance records. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7 gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) per processor. The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 GFLOPS in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three-dimensional crossbar network.〔H. Fujii, Y. Yasuda, H. Akashi, Y. Inagami, M. Koga, O. Ishihara, M. Syazwan, H. Wada, T. Sumimoto, Architecture and performance of the Hitachi SR2201 massively parallel processor system, Proceedings of 11th International Parallel Processing Symposium, April 1997, Pages 233–241.〕〔Y. Iwasaki, The CP-PACS project, Nuclear Physics B – Proceedings Supplements, Volume 60, Issues 1–2, January 1998, Pages 246–254.〕〔A.J. van der Steen, Overview of recent supercomputers, Publication of the NCF, Stichting Nationale Computer Faciliteiten, the Netherlands, January 1997.〕 The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes, communicating via the Message Passing Interface.〔''Scalable input/output: achieving system balance'' by Daniel A. Reed 2003 ISBN 978-0-262-68142-1 page 182〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「supercomputer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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