New-age Supercomputers: Hi-Speed Networks and Information Security

Abstract

The author describes computing strategic tasks that are used for ensuring defense and national security, the most important scientific, technical, biomedical and sociology tasks. Most typically, these are capability-based tasks. Supercomputers for their solution are respectively called Technical Capability, i.e. machines of extreme technical capabilities. Machines of this segment are also called High End Computers (HEC), and in our terminology - strategic supercomputers (SCs). Moving to the engineering level, author says that for tasks with good spatio-temporal work with memory, cache memory and schemes for automatically pre-loading data into the cache memory can be effectively used. This can significantly reduce the average memory access time of several hundred processor cycles to fractions of a processor cycle. Such tasks are usually called computational or cache-friendly (cach-friendly) - CF tasks. On tasks with poor spatio-temporal work with memory, the cache memory is useless, so each memory access is hundreds of processor cycles, the processor is idle because of this, and therefore the real performance is in units or even a fraction of a percent of the peak. Such tasks are historically called tasks with intensive irregular work with memory – Data intensive tasks (DIS-tasks). The given examples of spatially-temporal work with task memory and real characteristics of equipment operation in such different modes are given in order to illustrate that in practice different types of supercomputers are needed, for example, for CF- and DIS-tasks.