Are supercomputers still relevant today?

A decade ago supercomputers were the ultimate information processors but since then the power of server farms has increased to equal that of the that of supercomputers so what is their future, in this video we try to find out.

Written researched and presented by Paul Shillito

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[RayLabs]

Thanks for the shout out on the IBM Roadrunner. I had the privilege to be the product manager for Road Runner (as well as several other Super Computers from IBM). It was my last job at IBM before being laid off in the great recession of 2009. We worked with SuSE to tune a Linux Kernel for it. Beside the computer itself we also had to develop a high speed switch/interconnect since nothing available was fast enough. This was called the Federation Switch, I don't recall what the bandwidth was. During the 4 year development cycle (from concept to delivery of Road Runner as well as the Blue Gene series) we were breaking through one bottle neck only to discover the next one to break through.

[Haawser]

I once visited a computer room to hand deliver an important spare. They said 'Take a seat, the guy you want will be here in a minute'. So I sat down on this funky round couch. Which turned out to be a Cray One.

[Vizal]

How I love your videos! No distracting music or effects, shouting or running around, just pure information delivered in a very professional manner. Doesn't come all that often anymore. I've been watching you for years, thank you for your amazing content!

[peterpruyne]

I’ve worked the console in the thumbnail, two of them in fact, a 6500 and a 7600. A crazy bad keyboard, perfect for something you don’t want typo’s on. But the displays were fantastic! Vector displays essentially tied right into the bus with their own dedicated peripheral processor. The alpha numerics each had their own little analog circuitry to draw the letter, gave each one a funky unique look. The water cooling for the machine and the ac for the room made it a loud and uncomfortable place. Noisy big iron. Good times!

[benjaminmacdonald]

In 1992 I worked for a company that would process geophysical data for oil exploration using a Cray supercomputer. At the time it was considered the most powerful computer on Earth. Flash forward to 2024 and the phone you might be holding in your hand can process the same data in seconds that would take hours for the Cray to accomplish.

[davidpilibosian]

I build gpu clusters for machine learning model training and they very much are supercomputing clusters. A medium sized cluster with 1000 servers will house 8, 000 gpus, 100, 000 cpu cores, 1, 000tb of ram and a petabyte of nvme storage all connected awith 3 petabits per second of networking infrastructure. Sometimes infiniband sometimes ethernet. You use slurm or openmp to schedule your job to run in parallel on all of them at once, it's insane.

[projectartichoke]

I think you hit the nail right on the head. There will always be a need for discrete supercomputers as long as there are computational matters of national security.

[CompleteAnimation]

I didn't know that Cray was still in business!

My first exposure to Cray supercomputers was in the book Jurassic Park, where they used them to help with genetic engineering. It's crazy that my laptop has more computing power on tap than that supercomputer from the 1990s.

[metalhead]

Wait there let me just run a full weather simulation for the next few days on my phone....

[shunpillay]

This is my area of specialisation, so the title made me feel a bit uncomfortable - but your coverage of the topic turned out to be even-handed and fair. Good video.

[Kyanzes]

7:00 16GFLOPS of 64-bit arithmetic, and today a 4070 can do 455 GIGAFLOPS of FP64. ~30 times of that. The Cray-3 used around ~150 kW at top performance max. The 4070 uses ~200W max. so around ~7 watts of power is needed to do the same amount of calculations as the Cray-3 was capable at ~150 kilowatts.

[fridaycaliforniaa]

I've been watching your videos for many years now, and I still haven't found anything boring in any of them. Long time subscriber here, and I'm still so happy everytime you post something 😊

[cdl]

The crucial thing about a modern dedicated supercomputer system, as opposed to a server farm, is the switch and associated interconnect, which facilitates communication between the processors. This can comprise nearly half of the machine in terms of complexity and cost. Also, each server unit (which usually comes on a special chassis called a blade) contains several processor sockets, populated by special enterprise-class processors, which support multi-socket symmetric multi processing (SMP). The standard Linux kernel has supported SMP as standard for many years, buy the way. Also, let us not forget the contribution made to the art of parallel processing by the Transputer in the 1990's, and by the great computer scientist Gene Amdahl in the 1960's.

[ReadTheShrill]

6:28 This brings back memories. I learned Assembly Language on a Motorola 6809. This led to a lucrative 30 year career as a programmer.

[Roxor]

Modern supercomputers are the computing embodiment of the old saying "Quantity has a quality all its own."

When a supercomputer gets decommissioned, the individual nodes of it can be sold off as second-hand servers, as fundamentally, that's what they are.

[Manic]

Really nice job Sir. Note : Cray is now part of HPE since 2019, mostly used for inferencing LLM. I will share this video my team, as we currently works on it. :)

[jimm]

I worked at two facilities in Research Triangle Park North Carolina that had Cray computers. The first was MCNC, probably 1989-90. I think it was a Cray 1. Later I worked as a contractor for the EPA for 11 years, they had two Cray's. I don't really remember what shape they were or model, even though I spent an enormous amount of time in the room. It was a pretty cool experience!

[davidherron]

at around 13:25 when you said like Quantum computers cracking encryption in a matter of hours instead of thousand of years...." I was hovering over the skip bar as i expected another subtle advert from the sponsor but it never came haha

[andersjjensen]

And just for some "name dropping balance": El Capitan runs on AMD Epyc CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. And yes, I know it was written on screen, but I counted so many "glamour shots" of Nvidia and Intel products that I think a bit of balance is called for.

[T.h.e__T.r.u.t.h]

Michael Crichton mentioned cray and the movie mentioned thinking machines super computers and now it all makes sense thank you so much