Talk:Supercomputer

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[edit] request

Has anyone produced a graph showing supercomputer FLOP speed over time, and then added "popular" computers onto it, like the Altair 8080, TRS-80, Sinclair ZX, PC (at various clock speeds), PlayStation, and PDAs? I think such a graph would be very interesting indeed. Since "popular" computers came into existence in the mid 1970s, I don't think that they've ever been more than 15 years behind the Supercomputers. I would absolutely LOVE to see such a graph. —Preceding unsigned comment added by New Thought (talk • contribs) 08:34, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] vandalism

Removed vandalism. someone double check I resotred the right version when possible? Jaqie Fox 03:44, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] appropriate reference?

I'm not sure if posting a link to an Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode at the top of the page is particularly relevant or does anything for the credibility of this page as a source of information on super computers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.45.26.165 (talk) 02:24, 28 March, 2007 (UTC)

It's not really a reference, just a disambiguation link for anyone who happens to come here looking for the other topic. --Mary quite contrary (hai?) 02:37, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I replaced the ATHF disambiguation link - it is not a reference. While someone doing research on supercomputers would not be looking for that episode (it is not an obscure show by any definition), someone looking for that episode might end up here by mistake. Hence the disambiguation link. I apologize for forgetting the edit summary, but disambiguation is very important to helping people find what they need on Wikipedia, so please leave the link as is. --Mary quite contrary (hai?) 16:14, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

If we had a disambiguation link for every TV episode title in existence, we'd have a link on the top of almost every single major wiki entry.

I tend to agree with you here, even though I've reverted removals in the past. It seems that other editors wanted to keep it, but I'd be glad to see it go, I'd think anyone searching for the ATHF episode will probably not be too confused to find an article about a supercomputer if they searched for that term. -- JSBillings 11:36, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

The point is not whether someone searching for the eposide would be surprised to end up at a supercomputer article, it's whether someone searching for that episode would stumble across this page while trying to find it. If it is not easy enough for people to find, it will not get used as a resource (wikipedia) as much. It's all in making things more easily accessible to people. Jaqie Fox 05:17, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I looked at other articles that share their name with ATHF episode names. Most of them either do not have a link directly to the ATHF article (The and Super Model for example) and some refer to a disambiguation page which links to the ATHF episode (Circus for example). I think that a link to a disambiguation page would look better than a link to a cartoon at the top of an article about supercomputers. -- JSBillings 13:58, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I heartily agree. total removal is bad, a disambiguation link such as is on Circus is much preferred to the current link. Jaqie Fox 21:52, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Ok, Supercomputer (disambiguation) exists and is referred to at the top of the article. I just added the Supercomputer and Super Computer links. I'm thinking it might be nice to link to High Performance Computing too. -- JSBillings 22:44, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

I still think it's inappropriate. We don't have disamgiuation links for Super Bowl, Super Model, PDA, etc. for ATHF episodes because it's such an obscure show. And the episode articles are merely stubs. It's like an ATHF invasion of wiki. - Animesouth 03:19, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Pardon the change, but this is turning into a single long conversation thread anyway so there's no use in keeping all those spacings that wastes so much space in this case. Anyway, I personally hate AHTF and wish it would vaporize into thin air with all the other stuff I feel is crap, but it is definitely not obscure by the wikipedia definition, and if you feel the stubs don't belong then you should edit them into full articles, or maybe campaign to make it into a single AHTF article instead of one for each show, but this is not the place to discuss that, the AHTF page is. The disambiguation page as it stands now is precisely what was needed. Whether or not to link the AHTF from here should no longer be discussed because it is not linked from here, it is linked from the disambiguation page itself. Jaqie Fox 06:27, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

I think the link to the Supercomputer_(disambiguation) page is a good compromise. Ttiotsw 08:02, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

An ATHF episode may be significant enough to have a wiki article (which I certainly doubt, but as you stated, that's a different argument altogether), but is it significant enough to listed as a disambiguation of a much more encyclopedic-worthy article? No one is going to remember ATHF in 10 years. But supercomputers will be around, if not merely for historical purposes. Even "The Sopranos", which is a vastly more popular cable TV show, does not have disambiguation links for its episode titles when it coincides with major articles. Why should ATHF receive preferential treament? -Animesouth 14:06, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

The disambiguation page is a compromise between those who think it is useless to link to an ATHF page on this article, and those who want to maintain a useful project that has information for any audience. I tend to agree with you that a TV episode is an ephemeral item, however it is actually pretty hard to find the ATHF episode entry if you're actually looking for it on wikipedia. The disambiguation page solves the problem. -- JSBillings 16:12, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

JSBillings, it's not an issue nor a war, not anymore. I contacted an admin a few moments ago (as animesouth had been vandalizing my talk page with false vandalism warnings, which is in itself vandalism) and got it all straightened out. check my and animesouth's pages if you want more info :) Jaqie Fox 16:39, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Ack! Please stop removing the colons for indenting. If you feel that it takes up too much space, customize the stylesheet you use to view Wikipedia. Read Help:User_style for more information about that. In fact, stop removing other people's comments altogether! -- JSBillings 12:26, 5 July 2007 (UTC)


By WP:VAND definition, removal of user discussion comments is considered vandalism: "Discussion page vandalism: Blanking the posts of other users from talk pages other than your own". -Animesouth 01:39, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Software Tools

I reverted the Software Tools section to something that was actually about software tools. I removed the "Virtual Supercomputer" reference, because the definition of supercomputer is better explained later. The software tools section starts out OK, but then turns into an advertisement for Apple's software. JSBillings 13:34, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Shaw TSRTWO Project ?

Am I the only one who thinks this addition is rather suspicious? Some more detailed references seem to be necessary...

JH-man 08:51, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Considering it links to pages created by the same user as the editor who added it, and the name of the user, I tend to think it is quite suspicious. I haven't heard of it before, and judging from the fact that all the pages that it refers to were created at the same time as the entry with no external references, it's probably bogus. JSBillings 11:42, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Small error / inconsistency with tabulators linked

If you look at the very first of the wikipedia article, and then over at the linked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine page, the year in which New York Times first used the 'supercomputer' term is different. As I do not know the proper year and am incredibly tired(insomnia) someone please look up the right one and fix this.... oh and please remove this entire comment of mine once you have, if you would. thanks! Jaqie Fox 12:32, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleaned up "Software Tools" section

I removed a lot of text from the "Software Tools" section because part of it read like an advertisement for Apple's Shake (software) app. I think the section really needs to be expanded, discussing other tools, such as performance tuning tools (vtune, for example) and debugging tools for supercomuting/hpc code (such as totalview). JSBillings 14:14, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New information about BlueGene

All the information about the BlueGene/P was added without any references. The current references are all old, and only refer to the BlueGene/L. -- JSBillings 14:23, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

(Note: I'm not the editor who added Blue Gene/P in the first place.) This page has had over-enthusiastic additions of "the fastest computer" several times over the years. However, the lead para on the timeline says that we now use the TOP500 as our benchmark. Therefore, I removed most of the info, since it is in the Blue Gene article anyway. I also adjusted the references for BlueGene/L, added a refrence for Blue Gene/P, and removed the assertion that Blue Gene/P is currently the fastest, since it is not yet deployed.I should probably also move it to the "research" area until it actually shows up on the TOP500, but I decided to trust IBM for a few months. Feel free to be harsher as necessary. -Arch dude 16:55, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
So much for trust. I finally noticed this again and removed the paragraph entirely, since it proved to be incorrect. -Arch dude (talk) 10:33, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unified formatting for flop/flops/FLOPS

Between petaflop, petaflops, petaFLOPS, PFLOPS, TFLOPS, etc. I think there should be a standard usage throughout this article. It gets confusing when two different notations are used for the same measurement.

The article has a specific paragraph explaining the units of measurement, and the article uses TFLOPS consistently instead of teraflops. I therefore added the definition of PFLOPS to the definition paragraph and changed all occurances of "petaflops" to PFLOPS. -Arch dude 16:47, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
A greater problem exists in the performance figures for each machine in the table. The performance figures do not correspond to the performance of any of those machines in the year of their introduction be they Cray-1 or CDC 205, etc. The cited performance figures are optimistic at best only in the latter year of their introduction. Additionally, at best only site in the world existed for the 205 to anywhere near approach that performance because the configuration of the machine only existed at one site (all other sites having far smaller pipe configurations). I would go so far as to suggest removing that entry because I never that performance and is likely that it's a cooked up marketing number. The article as a whole needs a good going over. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 23:37, 28 December 2007 (UTC) --enm

[edit] Repairing vandalism

There were a lot of things removed by several vandals. Including this was a bunch of perfectly good links, that I've restored. I also restored the Quasi-supercomputing section, which must have been lost in the vandalism fixes. -- JSBillings 21:30, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FLOPS versus OPS

There is no explanation of "OPS" and derivatives, used for pre-1960 computers in the table, and no explanation of how it relates to FLOPS w.r.t. processing speed/time. —DIV (128.250.204.118 00:56, 24 October 2007 (UTC))

FLOPS=Floating-Point Operations Per Second OPS=Operations Per Second

FLOPS is simply restricting your performance measurments to only measuring operations dealing with floating-point numbers.

Veddan (talk) 15:41, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

I think the definition needs work: Surely a supercomputer is a computer that is 'massively' faster than an 'average' (or even 'good') contemporary computer, irrespective of whether the prospective supercomputer is actually the fastest or 'near' the fastest.
In particular, considering the TOP500 list of 27 June 2007 listed the worlds fastest "supercomputer" speed as 280.6 TFLOPS, while the world's 500th fastest "supercomputer" speed was only 4.0 TFLOPS — basically 70 times slower. Note further that the slower machine was dated 2007, whereas the newer machine was dated 2005.
It is not accurate to state that the slower machine "led the world (or was close to doing so) in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction" (as the article currently reads), and yet it is accepted that it is a "supercomputer"!
— DIV (128.250.204.118 01:12, 24 October 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Update on speed of Blue Gene/L

Blue Gene/L seems to have been upgraded over summer, and is now clocking in at 478 TFLOPS. References http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7092339.stm http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1889245.html http://www.hemscott.com/news/latest-news/item.do?newsId=53878217307964

Should maybe change the article to reflect this. Malbolge 12:06, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Actually, that's the BlueGene/P, and I don't believe there is a real-world installation yet. (correct me if I'm wrong). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jsbillings (talk • contribs) 12:44, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Nope, it is the BlueGene/L. According to the TOP500, its achieved 478.2 TFLOPS after a recent upgrade as mentioned before. Rilak 13:41, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ranger

I'm surprized there's nothing on the Sun Microsystems' new supercomputer called Ranger in Wikipedia yet. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 00:04, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Inconsistency in List vis-a-vis Top 500

Hi,

According to the Top 500, the Thinking Machine supercomputer of 1993 had a "Rpeak Sum (GF)" of 691. I assume that they mean a top speed of 691 GFLOPS. But the list here says the Thinking Machines CM-5/1024 in 1993 was capable of only 65.5 GFLOPS. Why the inconsistency?

Thanks,

210.206.137.53 (talk) 06:06, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

The list here is correct. If I am not mistaken (I'm not familiar with Thinking Machine's systems) the CM-5's architecture supports a maximum of 16,384 processors. The system listed here is clearly stated to have had 1,024 processors, thus the difference in performance. Also, I think that the TOP500 always gives the maximum theoretical performance when discussing a system, and the actual benchmarked performance when discussing an installation. Rilak (talk) 12:44, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Software tools - Open source community

This quote seems a bit... anti-open source, I doubt anyone in the open source community would deliberately create 'disruptive' software when it comes to this field but not sure, maybe someone else noticed that? "open source community which often creates disruptive technology in this arena." Akritu (talk) 07:49, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

I linked it. "Disruptive technology" is a marketing term from the dot.bomb era. It is (was) actually a highly favorable description: if y9ou had Disruptive technology, you would make a lot on money,and itf you did nbot, your were a dinosaur. -Arch dude (talk) 01:35, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Restriction to Top500

I removed a non-Top500 entry from the list. The entry was for TACC and was based on a press release. While I have no reason to doubt that TACC is as fast as described, We need to have some sort of objective standard, and today, as flawed as it may be, Top500 is that standard.

There have been many, many announcements of "Fastest computer" since 1993 that are not on this list, and the list will become unwieldy if we add them all. Allowing self-proclaimed "#1"s in this list would be the equivalent of allowing any professional american football team to add itself to a list of #1 football teams based on the weekly standings rather than on the superbowl. -Arch dude (talk) 09:56, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

What are the sources for the list? I understand prior to 1993 there are various sources. Otherwise TOP500. I am looking for a list just like this for print publication and would like to source them accurately (including a "compiled by" source) The TACC DATA hopefully will make the next list. ---(austexcal, may 19,2008) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Austexcal (talk • contribs) 22:55, 19 May 2008 (UTC)