AsianScientist (Sep. 5, 2017) – By Kenneth Ban – Built at a cost of US$1.25 billion, the K supercomputer in Japan occupies 3,000 square meters of floor space and has an estimated operating cost of US$10 million every year. Although this kind of expense is out of reach save for the world’s wealthiest individuals, it is actually not that difficult to build a simple supercomputer in your spare time.
The term ‘supercomputer,’ after all, refers more to how the machine is designed rather than how powerful it is. What makes machines like the K supercomputer so blazingly fast is that they break large and complex problems into smaller tasks that can be handled independently and simultaneously, by a method called parallelization.
In traditional computing, tasks are completed in sequence or serially, like a supermarket cashier serving customers one by one. Parallel computing is analogous to opening up more cashier lanes, improving the performance of the system by distributing the computing load across more nodes.
And since computing technology has now advanced to the point where the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than a supercomputer from a decade ago, hardware components are now so widely and cheaply available that it’s possible to build a functioning supercomputer for under a thousand dollars.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps needed to build to do just that. Excited to get started? Let’s go!
Hardware
The basic unit of a supercomputer is a core—the part of the machine where each individual computational task is performed, like a single cashier in our supermarket example. A single microprocessor or central processing unit (CPU) can contain one or more cores, and is usually connected to other components like memory, storage and external ports, which together make up a node.
The K computer, for example, uses a CPU that has eight cores. Individual nodes are then placed into a cabinet which holds a total of 102 nodes, 96 of them handling the computation and six of them dedicated to handling the input and output. The entire K computer system spans 864 cabinets, giving it a total of 705,024 cores [8 cores × 102 nodes/ cabinet × 864 cabinets]! Our minimalist supercomputer is much, much more modest. All it requires is your existing personal computer which will act as the head node, compute nodes in the form of cheap Raspberry Pi computers, and credit card-sized miniature motherboards.
Power hungry
Obviously, machines on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers need much more power and sophisticated cooling systems than cellphone chargers and desk fans! The K computer, for example, uses ten million Watts of power each year, enough to power 10,000 homes. A typical cellphone charger only supplies about 3 Watts of power, but that’s more than enough for a Raspberry Pi!
