SimScience - Membranes - Advanced, page 20

Simulating membranes with supercomputers

First, what is a supercomputer? Many definitions of a supercomputer do not stand the test of time. The machine that you are using to look at this page is more powerful than machines that were called supercomputers only 20 years ago. One useful definition of a supercomputer is a computer that is at least 10 times as powerful as a fast desktop computer.

Probably the most famous supercomputer was the Cray-1 introduced in 1976 and capable of 133 million arithmetic operations per second (MFLOPS (*)). [Picture of Cray1 supercomputer]

A Cray-1 supercomputer
© 1998 Cray Research/Silicon Graphics. Used with permission.

One of the machines currently offered by Cray Research is the Cray T3E series. This machine can be configured in different sizes including configurations with performance in excess of 1 trillion arithmetic operations per second (TFLOPS (*)). This is 10,000 times the power of the Cray-1 ! [Picture of Cray T3E supercomputer]

One cabinet of a Cray T3E
(large systems may have 8 cabinets)
© 1998 Cray Research/Silicon Graphics. Used with permission.

Supercomputers are required to perform simulations of membranes because the simulations require truly phenomenal numbers of arithmetic operations to be performed. Recent work simulating membranes at Syracuse University required over 500,000,000,000,000 such operations which is the equivalent of hundreds of hours of computer time, even using very fast computers.