a state-of-the-art, extremely powerful computer capable of manipulating massive amounts of data in a relatively short time. Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for specialized scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation, among them meteorology, animated graphics, fluid dynamic calculations, nuclear energy research and weapon simulation, and petroleum exploration. There are two approaches to the design of supercomputers. One, called massively parallel processing (MPP), is to chain together thousands of commercially available microprocessors utilizing parallel processing techniques. A variant of this, called a Beowulf cluster, or cluster computing, employs large numbers of personal computers interconnected by a local area network and running programs written for parallel processing. The other approach, called vector processing, is to develop specialized hardware to solve complex calculations. This technique was employed in the Earth Simulator, a Japanese supercomputer introduced in 2002 that utilizes 640 nodes composed of 5104 specialized processors to execute 35.6 trillion mathematical operations per second; it will be used to analyze earthquake and weather patterns and climate change, including global warming. Seven of the ten fastest supercomputers in 2003 were MPP machines. Two U.S. supercomputers of the first type in development are ASCI Purple, to be unveiled in 2004 and utilizing 12,500 processors to execute 100 trillion mathematical operations per second for nuclear weapon simulations, and Blue Gene/Lite, to be introduced in 2005 and utilizing 130,000 processors to execute 360,000 trillion mathematical operations per second for environmental simulations. A prototype of Blue Gene/L demonstrated in 2003 is air-cooled, as opposed to many high-performance machines that use water and refrigeration, and uses no more power than the average home. In 2003 scientists at Virginia Tech assembled a relatively low-cost supercomputer using 1,100 dual-processor Apple Macintoshes; it was ranked as the third fastest machine in the world.

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

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