The design, construction, and performance of a large-scale general-purpose digital computer [includes joint discussion]

The Anti-Proton ANnihilation at DArmstadt (PANDA) experiment proposed at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt (Germany) will perform a high-precision spectroscopy of charmonium and exotic hadrons, such as hybrids, glueballs and hypernuclei. A highly intense beam of anti-protons provided by High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) with an unprecedented resolution will scan a mass range of 2 to 5.5 GeV/c2. In preparation for experiments with PANDA, careful and large-scale simulation studies need to be performed in the coming years to determine analysis strategies, to provide feedback for the design, construction and performance optimisation of individual detector components and to design methods for the calibration and interpretation of the experimental results. Results of a simulation for the ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMC), built from lead tungstate (PWO) crystals and placed inside the Target Spectrometer (TS), are presented. The simulations were carried out using the PandaRoot framework, which is based on ROOT and being developed by the PANDA collaboration.

Download Full-text

Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine (1947)

The Essential Turing ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198250791.003.0015 ◽

2004 ◽

Author(s):

Alan Turing

Keyword(s):

Digital Computer ◽

Large Scale ◽

National Physical Laboratory ◽

General Purpose ◽

Computing Machinery ◽

Universal Turing Machine ◽

Concrete Form ◽

Electronic Computing ◽

The Government ◽

Set Up

On 8 December 1943 the world’s first large-scale special-purpose electronic digital computer—‘Colossus’, as it became known—went into operation at the Government Code and Cypher School (see ‘Computable Numbers: A Guide’, ‘Enigma’, and the introduction to Chapter 4). Colossus was built by Thomas H. Flowers and his team of engineers at the Post Office Research Station in Doll is Hill, London. Until relatively recently, few had any idea that electronic digital computation was used successfully during the Second World War, since those who built and worked with Colossus were prohibited by the Official Secrets Act from sharing their knowledge. Colossus contained approximately the same number of electronic valves (vacuum tubes) as von Neumann’s IAS computer, built at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study and dedicated in 1952. The IAS computer was forerunner of the IBM 701, the company’s first mass-produced stored-programme electronic computer (1953). The first Colossus had 1,600 electronic valves and Colossus II, installed in mid-1944, 2,400, while the IAS computer had 2,600. Colossus lacked two important features of modern computers. First, it had no internally stored programmes (see ‘Computable Numbers: A Guide’). To set up Colossus for a new task, the operators had to alter the machine’s physical wiring, using plugs and switches. Second, Colossus was not a general-purpose machine, being designed for a specific cryptanalytic task (involving only logical operations and counting). Nevertheless, Flowers had established decisively and for the first time that large-scale electronic computing machinery was practicable. The implication of Flowers’s racks of electronic equipment would have been obvious to Turing. Once Turing had seen Colossus it was, Flowers said, just a matter of Turing’s waiting to see what opportunity might arise to put the idea of his universal computing machine into practice. Precisely such an opportunity fell into Turing’s lap in 1945, when John Womersley invited him to join the Mathematics Division of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at Teddington in London, in order to design and develop an electronic stored-programme digital computer—a concrete form of the universal Turing machine of 1936.

Download Full-text

Integration, Development and Performance of the 500 TFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster (Condor)

Volume 2: 32nd Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Parts A and B ◽

10.1115/detc2012-70083 ◽

2012 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Mark Barnell ◽

Qing Wu ◽

Richard Linderman

Keyword(s):

Performance Optimization ◽

High Performance ◽

Large Scale ◽

Situational Awareness ◽

General Purpose ◽

Lessons Learned ◽

Heterogeneous Cluster ◽

Graphic Processing Units ◽

Intelligence Models ◽

And Performance

The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate Advanced Computing Division (AFRL/RIT) High Performance Computing Affiliated Resource Center (HPC-ARC) is the host to a very large scale interactive computing cluster consisting of about 1800 nodes. Condor, the largest interactive Cell cluster in the world, consists of integrated heterogeneous processors of IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) multicore CPUs, NVIDIA General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) and Intel x86 server nodes in a 10Gb Ethernet Star Hub network and 20Gb/s Infiniband Mesh, with a combined capability of 500 trillion floating operations per second (TFLOPS). Applications developed and running on CONDOR include large-scale computational intelligence models, video synthetic aperture radar (SAR) back-projection, Space Situational Awareness (SSA), video target tracking, linear algebra and others. This presentation will discuss the design and integration of the system. It will also show progress on performance optimization efforts and lessons learned on algorithm scalability on a heterogeneous architecture.

Download Full-text