Ask the Supercomputer

Cluster Computing: The Commodity Supercomputer

The availability of high-speed networks and increasingly powerful commodity microprocessors is making the usage of clusters, or networks, of computers an appealing vehicle for cost effective parallel computing. Clusters, built using Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware components as well as free, or commonly used, software, are playing a major role in redefining the concept of supercomputing...

To ask or not to ask, that is the question

Appropriate Questions:  What are you looking for in a summer intern? (then be prepared to demonstrate how you fit those desired skills)  What has been your most interesting case/project in the past year?  What drew you to this employer/what was your path to this organization/firm?  I spoke with ______, the Michigan student who worked here two summers ago, and s/he said (fill in positive asp...

1 The BlueGene/L Supercomputer ∗

The architecture of the BlueGene/L massively parallel supercomputer is described. Each computing node consists of a single compute ASIC plus 256 MB of external memory. The compute ASIC integrates two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 integer CPU cores, two 2.8 Gflops floating point units, 4 MB of embedded DRAM as cache, a memory controller for external memory, six 1.4 Gbit/s bi-directional ports for a 3-dime...

Ask the Children

The Performance of the Intel TFLOPS Supercomputer

The purpose of building a supercomputer is to provide superior performance on real applications. In this paper, we describe the performance of the Intel TFLOPS Supercomputer starting at the lowest level with a detailed investigation of the Pentium® Pro processor and the supporting memory subsystem. We follow this with a description of the benchmarks used to track the performance of the machine ...