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Virtual Vector Architecture
ViVA (Virtual Vector Architecture) is a technology from IBM for coupling together multiple scalar floating point units to act as a single vector processor. Certain computing tasks are more efficiently handled through vector computations where an instruction can be applied to multiple elements simultaneously, rather than the scalar approach where one instruction is applied to one piece of data at a time. This kind of technology is highly sought after for scientific computing and is IBM's answer to the vector-based supercomputers pioneered by Cray and that was the basis for NEC's Earth Simulator which was the fastest supercomputer in the world 2002-2004. ViVA was developed and implemented by IBM together with National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center inside the Blue Planet project where they had 8 dual core POWER5 processors made into one vector processor capable of approximately 60-80 GFLOPS of computing power. ViVA technology is in use in the ASC Purple supercomputer. Wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scalar (computing)
Scalar processors are a class of computer processors that process only one data item at a time. Typical data items include integers and floating point numbers. Classification A scalar processor is classified as a single instruction, single data ( SISD) processor in Flynn's taxonomy. The Intel 486 is an example of a scalar processor. It is to be contrasted with a vector processor where a single instruction operates simultaneously on multiple data items (and thus is referred to as a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) processor). The difference is analogous to the difference between scalar and vector arithmetic. The term ''scalar'' in computing dates to the 1970 and 1980s when vector processors were first introduced. It was originally used to distinguish the older designs from the new vector processors. Superscalar processor A superscalar processor (such as the Intel P5) may execute more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating Point Unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Modern designs generally include a fused multiply-add instruction, which was found to be very common in real-world code. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software. Floating-point operations were originally handled in software in early computers. Over time, manufacturers began to provide standardized floating-point libraries as part of their software collections. Some machines, those dedicated to scientific processing, would include specialized hardware to perform some of these tasks with much greater speed. The introduction of microcode in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vector Processor
In computing, a vector processor or array processor is a central processing unit (CPU) that implements an instruction set where its instructions are designed to operate efficiently and effectively on large one-dimensional arrays of data called ''vectors''. This is in contrast to scalar processors, whose instructions operate on single data items only, and in contrast to some of those same scalar processors having additional single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) or SIMD within a register (SWAR) Arithmetic Units. Vector processors can greatly improve performance on certain workloads, notably numerical simulation, compression and similar tasks. Vector processing techniques also operate in video-game console hardware and in graphics accelerators. Vector machines appeared in the early 1970s and dominated supercomputer design through the 1970s into the 1990s, notably the various Cray platforms. The rapid fall in the price-to-performance ratio of conventional microprocessor de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1018 FLOPS, so called Exascale computing, exascale supercomputers. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the TOP500, world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. 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, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cray
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. In 1972, the company was founded by computer designer Seymour Cray as Cray Research, Inc., and it continues to manufacture parts in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where Cray was born and raised. After being acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, the modern company was formed after being purchased in 2000 by Tera Computer Company, which adopted the name Cray Inc. In 2019, the company was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $1.3 billion. History Background: 1950–1972 In 1950, Seymour Cray began working in the computing field when he joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There, he helped to create the ERA 1103. ERA eventually ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) research facility that was founded in 1974. The National User Facility is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. Mission The mission is to establish a computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems which can be used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research with energy efficiency, storage, generation and Earth systems science, understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the Universe. The largest research areas are High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research. History NERSC was founded in 1974 as the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POWER5
The POWER5 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by IBM. It is an improved version of the POWER4. The principal improvements are support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and an on-die memory controller. The POWER5 is a dual-core microprocessor, with each core supporting one physical Thread (computing), thread and two logical threads, for a total of two physical threads and four logical threads. History Technical details of the microprocessor were first presented at the 2003 Hot Chips (symposium), Hot Chips conference. A more complete description was given at Microprocessor Forum 2003 on 14 October 2003. The POWER5 was not sold openly and was used exclusively by IBM and their partners. Systems using the microprocessor were introduced in 2004. The POWER5 competed in the high-end enterprise server market, mostly against the Intel Itanium 2 and to a lesser extent, the Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC IV and the Fujitsu SPARC64 V. It was superseded in 2005 by an improve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FLOPS
Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second. Floating-point arithmetic Floating-point arithmetic is needed for very large or very small real numbers, or computations that require a large dynamic range. Floating-point representation is similar to scientific notation, except computers use base two (with rare exceptions), rather than base ten. The encoding scheme stores the sign, the exponent (in base two for Cray and VAX, base two or ten for IEEE floating point formats, and base 16 for IBM Floating Point Architecture) and the significand (number after the radix point). While several similar formats are in use, the most common is ANSI/IEEE Std. 754-1985. This standard defines the format for 32-bit numbers called ''single precision'', a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ASC Purple
ASC Purple was a supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The computer was a collaboration between IBM Corporation and Lawrence Livermore Lab. Announced November 19, 2002, it was installed in July 2005 and decommissioned on November 10, 2010. The contract for this computer along with the Blue Gene, Blue Gene/L supercomputer was worth US $290 million. As of November 2009, the computer ranked 66th on the TOP500 supercomputer list. It was a redundant ring of POWER5 Symmetric multiprocessing, SMP servers. 196 of these machines were connected together. The system contained 12,544 POWER5 microprocessors in total with 50 terabytes of total memory and 2 petabytes of total disk storage. The system ran IBM's AIX operating system, AIX 5L operating system. The computer consumed 7.5 Megawatt, MW of electricity, including cooling. It has a theoretical processing speed of 100 Flops, teraflops. It was built as stage five of the Advanced Sim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
POWER6
The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA#Power ISA v.2.05, Power ISA v.2.05. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5#POWER5+, POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It is claimed to be part of the eCLipz project, said to have a goal of converging IBM's server hardware where practical (hence "ipz" in the acronym: IBM AS/400, iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries). History POWER6 was described at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2006, and additional details were added at the Microprocessor Forum in October 2006 and at the next ISSCC in February 2007. It was formally announced on May 21, 2007. It was released on June 8, 2007 at speeds of 3.5, 4.2 and 4.7 GHz, but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz. POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005, and was bumped to 5.0 GHz in May 2008 with the introduction of the P595. Description The POWE ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
