"HOW DOES HPC WORK?"

 

The High-Performance Low-Down

Supercomputers are extremely fast and capable of calculations and running simulations of dazzling complexity. From the earliest designs until today, successive machines have always been about improving on the previous machine, sometimes by orders of magnitude in speed and performance. Computer engineers have been able to pull off some impressive tricks to make computers increasingly faster.

How Fast is Fast?

1. Whether you call them HPCs or supercomputers, they are FAST! All computers are based on large numbers of tiny switches called transistors, each flicking between on & off and storing & manipulating numbers far faster than human beings can. The rate at which the switching happens is dictated by clock speed – the gigahertz or GHz you hear about on adverts and in computer shops. But mainly that’s just a marketing trick. Not all processors work the same way, and some of the newest processors in laptops, desktops and mobile devices like tablet computers don’t have clock speeds as high as those from a few years ago. That’s because they work smarter – not harder. The best measurement has always been the number of instructions or operations a chip can carry out in a given time. For home machines, this is usually measured in Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), but for scientific computation the measure is Millions of Floating Point Operations Per Second (Megaflops, MFLOPS).
2. The very first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004, could carry out just under 0.1MIPS. A reasonably priced laptop PC bought in 2012 could rate at over 100,000 MIPS – more than a million times faster. Rating the modern chip for scientific computation comes up with a figure of 50,000 MFLOPS – not bad! But one of the fastest supercomputers around today – Japan’s K Computer – can do over 10,000,000,000 MFLOPS. That’s the equivalent of 200,000 laptops’ power in a single computer.

Making Sense of the Numbers:

1. Take something like processing a home movie and adding 3D effects. Of course, you have to have the skill to be able to use this software, but even if you do, you generally have to wait around for the computer to do its work. It’s telling that when film makers set out to make a movie consisting of large amounts of CGI – computer graphics imagery – they turn to supercomputers. A single frame from the film Avatar, which was wholly produced using computer graphics techniques, could take an incredible 30–50 hours to render on a standard desktop PC – imagine how long it would take to make the whole film this way, when there are 24 frames per second. Using supercomputer clusters incorporating 1000 processing units, this time is cut down to three-and-a-half minutes per frame. Using more processors means it takes less time.
2. There are even on-demand supercomputers specifically designed for generating 3D graphics, such as renderfarm.fi. Computer graphics are one of the areas of human industry that continues to drive supercomputer development.