A supercomputer generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled. Cooling most supercomputers is a major HVAC problem. Information cannot move faster than the speed of light between two parts of a supercomputer. For this reason, a supercomputer that is many metres across must have latencies between its components measured at least in the tens of nanoseconds. Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs attempted to keep cable runs as short as possible for this reason, hence the cylindrical shape of his Cray range of computers. In modern supercomputers built of many conventional CPUs running in parallel, latencies of 1–5 microseconds to send a message between CPUs are typical.
Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. According to Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." Much work on external storage bandwidth is needed to ensure that this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Technologies developed for supercomputers include:
Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. According to Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." Much work on external storage bandwidth is needed to ensure that this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Technologies developed for supercomputers include:
- Vector processing
- Liquid cooling
- Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
- Striped disks (the first instance of what was later called RAID)
- Parallel filesystems
