24.1 Understanding high performance computing  (Page 4/6)

The predicting of the weather is a good example for the need of High Performance Computing. Using the fastest central processing unit computer it might take a year to predict tomorrow's weather. The information would be correct but 365 days late. Using parallel processing techniques and a powerful "high performance computer", we might be able to predict tomorrow’s weather in 6 hours. Not only correct, but in time to be useful.

Measuring computer power

Most people are familiar with the giga hertz (billions of instructions per second) measure to describe how fast a single CPU's processor is running. Most microcomputers of today are running around 3 GHz or 3 billion instructions a second. Although 3 billion sounds fast, many of these instructions are simple operations.

Supercomputing uses a measurement involving floating point arithmetic calculations as the benchmark for comparing computer power. "In computing, FLOPS (or flops or flop / s ) is an acronym meaning FL oating point O perations P er S econd." and again "On May 25, 2008, an American military supercomputer built by IBM, named 'Roadrunner', reached the computing milestone of one petaflop by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second." (FLOPS from Wikipedia) For those of us not familiar:

You also should realize that your personal computer is not doing 3 gigafolp worth of calculations, but something slower when using the FLOPS measurement.

High performance computing made personal

It took several years (about 30) to get computers to a personal level (1951 to 1981). It took about twenty years (late 1980’s to present 2009) to get multi-processor computers to the personal level. Currently available to the general public are computers with "duo core" and "quad core" processors. In the near future, micro computers will have 8 to 16 core processors. People ask, "Why would I need that much computer power?" There are dozens of applications, but I can think of a least one item that almost everyone wants: high quality voice recognition. That's right! I want to talk to my computer. Toss your mouse, toss your keyboard, no more touch pad – talk to it.

Again, one short coming is that most programming efforts have been towards teaching and learning the sequential processing way of thinking or solving a problem. Educators will now need to teach and programmers will now need to develop skills in programming using parallel concepts and algorithms.

Summary

We have bounced you back and forth between sequential and parallel concepts. We covered our natural tendency to do work in parallel. But with the birth of computers the parallel concepts were set to the side and the computer industry implemented a faster single processor approach (sequential). We explained the limitations of sequential processing and the need for computing power. Thus, the birth of High Performance Computing. Parallel processing computers are migrating into our homes. With that migration, there is a great need to educate the existing generation and develop the next generation of scientists and programmers to be able to take advantage of High Performance Computing.