Tuesday, November 13, 2007
SUPER COMPUTERS
Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research. He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). Cray, himself, never used the word "supercomputer," a little-remembered fact is that he only recognized the word "computer." In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in a parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as IBM and HP, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience, although Cray Inc. still specializes in building supercomputers.
The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's normal computer. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. (This is commonly and humorously referred to as the attack of the killer micros in the industry.) Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Itanium, or x86-64, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.
[edit] Software tools
Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM, and open source-based software solutions such as Beowulf, WareWulf and openMosix which facilitate the creation of a supercomputer from a collection of ordinary workstations or servers. Technology like ZeroConf (Rendezvous/Bonjour) can be used to create ad hoc computer clusters for specialized software such as Apple's Shake compositing application. An easy programming language for supercomputers remains an open research topic in computer science. Several free utilities that would once have cost several thousands of dollars are now completely free thanks to the open source community which often creates disruptive technology in this arena.
[edit] Common uses
Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.
A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources.
Relevant here is the distinction between capability computing and capacity computing, as defined by Graham et al. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a large problem in the shortest amount of time. Oftentimes a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can. Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve somewhat large problems or many small problems or to prepare for a run on a capability system.
[edit] Hardware and software design
Processor board of a CRAY YMP vector computer
Supercomputers using custom CPUs traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times—in fact, much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing.
As with all highly parallel systems, Amdahl's law applies, and supercomputer designs devote great effort to eliminating software serialization, and using hardware to accelerate the remaining bottlenecks.
[edit] Supercomputer challenges, technologies
A supercomputer generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled. Cooling most supercomputers is a major HVAC problem.
Information cannot move faster than the speed of light between two parts of a supercomputer. For this reason, a supercomputer that is many meters across must have latencies between its components measured at least in the tens of nanoseconds. Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs attempted to keep cable runs as short as possible for this reason: hence the cylindrical shape of his Cray range of computers. In modern supercomputers built of many conventional CPUs running in parallel, latencies of 1-5 microseconds to send a message between CPUs are typical.
Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. According to Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." Much work on external storage bandwidth is needed to ensure that this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Technologies developed for supercomputers include:
Vector processing
Liquid cooling
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
Striped disks (the first instance of what was later called RAID)
Parallel filesystems
[edit] Processing techniques
Vector processing techniques were first developed for supercomputers and continue to be used in specialist high-performance applications. Vector processing techniques have trickled down to the mass market in DSP architectures and SIMD processing instructions for general-purpose computers.
Modern video game consoles in particular use SIMD extensively and this is the basis for some manufacturers' claim that their game machines are themselves supercomputers. Indeed, some graphics cards have the computing power of several TeraFLOPS. The applications to which this power can be applied was limited by the special-purpose nature of early video processing. As video processing has become more sophisticated, Graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved to become more useful as general-purpose vector processors, and an entire computer science sub-discipline has arisen to exploit this capability: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU.)
[edit] Operating systems
Supercomputers predominantly run some variant of Linux or UNIX. Linux is the most popular since 2004
Supercomputer operating systems, today most often variants of Linux or UNIX, are every bit as complex as those for smaller machines, if not more so. Their user interfaces tend to be less developed, however, as the OS developers have limited programming resources to spend on non-essential parts of the OS (i.e., parts not directly contributing to the optimal utilization of the machine's hardware). This stems from the fact that because these computers, often priced at millions of dollars, are sold to a very small market, their R&D budgets are often limited. (The advent of Unix and Linux allows reuse of conventional desktop software and user interfaces.)
Interestingly this has been a continuing trend throughout the supercomputer industry, with former technology leaders such as Silicon Graphics taking a back seat to such companies as NVIDIA, who have been able to produce cheap, feature-rich, high-performance, and innovative products due to the vast number of consumers driving their R&D.
Historically, until the early-to-mid-1980s, supercomputers usually sacrificed instruction set compatibility and code portability for performance (processing and memory access speed). For the most part, supercomputers to this time (unlike high-end mainframes) had vastly different operating systems. The Cray-1 alone had at least six different proprietary OSs largely unknown to the general computing community. Similarly different and incompatible vectorizing and parallelizing compilers for Fortran existed. This trend would have continued with the ETA-10 were it not for the initial instruction set compatibility between the Cray-1 and the Cray X-MP, and the adoption of UNIX operating system variants (such as Cray's Unicos and today's Linux.)
For this reason, in the future, the highest performance systems are likely to have a UNIX flavor but with incompatible system-unique features (especially for the highest-end systems at secure facilities).
[edit] Programming
The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Special-purpose Fortran compilers can often generate faster code than C or C++ compilers, so Fortran remains the language of choice for scientific programming, and hence for most programs run on supercomputers. To exploit the parallelism of supercomputers, programming environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are being used.
[edit] Modern supercomputer architecture
The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center
As of November 2006, the top ten supercomputers on the Top500 list (and indeed the bulk of the remainder of the list) have the same top-level architecture. Each of them is a cluster of MIMD multiprocessors, each processor of which is SIMD. The supercomputers vary radically with respect to the number of multiprocessors per cluster, the number of processors per multiprocessor, and the number of simultaneous instructions per SIMD processor. Within this hierarchy we have:
A computer cluster is a collection of computers that are highly interconnected via a high-speed network or switching fabric. Each computer runs under a separate instance of an Operating System (OS).
A multiprocessing computer is a computer, operating under a single OS and using more than one CPU, where the application-level software is indifferent to the number of processors. The processors share tasks using Symmetric multiprocessing(SMP) and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
An SIMD processor executes the same instruction on more than one set of data at the same time. The processor could be a general purpose commodity processor or special-purpose vector processor. It could also be high performance processor or a low power processor.
As of November 2006, the fastest machine is Blue Gene/L. This machine is a cluster of 65,536 computers, each with two processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently. By contrast, Columbia is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently.
As of 2005, Moore's Law and economies of scale are the dominant factors in supercomputer design: a single modern desktop PC is now more powerful than a 15-year old supercomputer, and the design concepts that allowed past supercomputers to out-perform contemporaneous desktop machines have now been incorporated into commodity PCs. Furthermore, the costs of chip development and production make it uneconomical to design custom chips for a small run and favor mass-produced chips that have enough demand to recoup the cost of production. A current model quad core Xeon workstation running at 2.66Ghz will outperform a multimillion dollar cray C90 supercomputer used in the early 1990s, lots of workloads requiring such a supercomputer in the 1990s can now be done on workstations costing less than 4000 US dollars.
Additionally, many problems carried out by supercomputers are particularly suitable for parallelization (in essence, splitting up into smaller parts to be worked on simultaneously) and, particularly, fairly coarse-grained parallelization that limits the amount of information that needs to be transferred between independent processing units. For this reason, traditional supercomputers can be replaced, for many applications, by "clusters" of computers of standard design which can be programmed to act as one large computer.
[edit] Special-purpose supercomputers
Special-purpose supercomputers are high-performance computing devices with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom VLSI chips, allowing higher price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. They are used for applications such as astrophysics computation and brute-force codebreaking. Historically a new special-purpose supercomputer has occasionally been faster than the world's fastest general-purpose supercomputer, by some measure. For example, GRAPE-6 was faster than the Earth Simulator in 2002 for a particular special set of problems.
Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:
Deep Blue, for playing chess
Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of machines
GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher
[edit] The fastest supercomputers today
[edit] Measuring supercomputer speed
The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (1012 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-,combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (1015 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.) This measurement is based on a particular benchmark which does LU decomposition of a large matrix. This mimics a class of real-world problems, but is significantly easier to compute than a majority of actual real-world problems.
[edit] The Top500 list
Main article: TOP500
Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the Top500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is the best current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time.
[edit] Current fastest supercomputer system
A BlueGene/P node card
As of August 2007, the IBM Blue Gene/L at LLNL is the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 280 TFLOPS.[2][3] [4]
On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer. These computers can sustain one PFLOPS. IBM has announced that several customers will install these systems later in 2007. One of these is likely to become the fastest deployed supercomputer at that time. [1]
The MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer, which was completed in June 2006, reportedly reached one PFLOPS calculation speed, though it may not qualify as a general-purpose supercomputer as its specialized hardware is optimized for molecular dynamics simulations.[5] [6][7]
[edit] Quasi-supercomputing
Some types of large-scale distributed computing for embarrassingly parallel problems take the clustered supercomputing concept to an extreme.
One such example is the BOINC platform, a host for a number of distributed computing projects. On March 27th 2007, BOINC recorded a processing power of over 530.7 TFLOPS through 1,797,000 plus computers on the network.[8] The largest project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home, reported processing power of 276.3 TFLOPS through 1,390,000 plus computers.[9]
Another distributed computing project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home, reported nearly 1.3 PFLOPS of processing power in late September 2007. A little over 1 PFLOPS of this processing power is contributed by clients running on PlayStation 3 systems.[10]
GIMPS's distributed Mersenne Prime search achieves currently 23 TFLOPS (as of October 2007).
Google's search engine system may be faster with estimated total processing power of between 126 and 316 TFLOPS. The New York Times estimates that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers.[11]
[edit] Research and Development
On September 9, 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer to use the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell B.E.) processor aiming to produce a machine capable of a sustained speed of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one PFLOPS. Another project in development by IBM is the Cyclops64 architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip".
In India, a project is under the leadership of Dr. Karmarkar is also developing a supercomputer that can reach one PFLOPS.[12]
CDAC is also building a supercomputer that can reach one PFLOPS by 2010.[13]
The NSF is funding a $200 million effort to develop a one petaFLOP supercomputer as well. It is being built by the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is slated to be completed by 2011.[14]
[edit] Timeline of supercomputers
This is a list of the record-holders for fastest general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the year each one set the record. For entries prior to 1993, this list refers to various sources[citation needed]. From 1993 to present, the list reflects the Top500 listing.
Year
Supercomputer
Peak speed
Location
1942
Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC)
30 OPS
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
TRE Heath Robinson
200 OPS
Bletchley Park
1944
Flowers Colossus
5 kOPS
Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill
1946
UPenn ENIAC(before 1948+ modifications)
100 kOPS
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA
1954
IBM NORC
67 kOPS
U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, USA
1956
MIT TX-0
83 kOPS
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA
1958
IBM AN/FSQ-7
400 kOPS
25 U.S. Air Force sites across the continental USA and 1 site in Canada (52 computers)
1960
UNIVAC LARC
250 kFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1961
IBM 7030 "Stretch"
1.2 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1964
CDC 6600
3 MFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1969
CDC 7600
36 MFLOPS
1974
CDC STAR-100
100 MFLOPS
1975
Burroughs ILLIAC IV
150 MFLOPS
NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA
1976
Cray-1
250 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA (80+ sold worldwide)
1981
CDC Cyber 205
400 MFLOPS
(numerous sites worldwide)
1983
Cray X-MP/4
941 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Battelle; Boeing
1984
M-13
2.4 GFLOPS
Scientific Research Institute of Computer Complexes, Moscow, USSR
1985
Cray-2/8
3.9 GFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1989
ETA10-G/8
10.3 GFLOPS
Florida State University, Florida, USA
1990
NEC SX-3/44R
23.2 GFLOPS
NEC Fuchu Plant, Fuchu, Japan
1993
Thinking Machines CM-5/1024
65.5 GFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Security Agency
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel
124.50 GFLOPS
National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
Intel Paragon XP/S 140
143.40 GFLOPS
Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel
170.40 GFLOPS
National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996
Hitachi SR2201/1024
220.4 GFLOPS
University of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi/Tsukuba CP-PACS/2048
368.2 GFLOPS
Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997
Intel ASCI Red/9152
1.338 TFLOPS
Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999
Intel ASCI Red/9632
2.3796 TFLOPS
2000
IBM ASCI White
7.226 TFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002
NEC Earth Simulator
35.86 TFLOPS
Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama-shi, Japan
The Cray-2 was the world's fastest computer from 1985 to 1989.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's normal computer. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. (This is commonly and humorously referred to as the attack of the killer micros in the industry.) Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Itanium, or x86-64, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects.
[edit] Software tools
Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM, and open source-based software solutions such as Beowulf, WareWulf and openMosix which facilitate the creation of a supercomputer from a collection of ordinary workstations or servers. Technology like ZeroConf (Rendezvous/Bonjour) can be used to create ad hoc computer clusters for specialized software such as Apple's Shake compositing application. An easy programming language for supercomputers remains an open research topic in computer science. Several free utilities that would once have cost several thousands of dollars are now completely free thanks to the open source community which often creates disruptive technology in this arena.
[edit] Common uses
Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.
A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources.
Relevant here is the distinction between capability computing and capacity computing, as defined by Graham et al. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a large problem in the shortest amount of time. Oftentimes a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can. Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve somewhat large problems or many small problems or to prepare for a run on a capability system.
[edit] Hardware and software design
Processor board of a CRAY YMP vector computer
Supercomputers using custom CPUs traditionally gained their speed over conventional computers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex detail engineering. They tend to be specialized for certain types of computation, usually numerical calculations, and perform poorly at more general computing tasks. Their memory hierarchy is very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times—in fact, much of the performance difference between slower computers and supercomputers is due to the memory hierarchy. Their I/O systems tend to be designed to support high bandwidth, with latency less of an issue, because supercomputers are not used for transaction processing.
As with all highly parallel systems, Amdahl's law applies, and supercomputer designs devote great effort to eliminating software serialization, and using hardware to accelerate the remaining bottlenecks.
[edit] Supercomputer challenges, technologies
A supercomputer generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled. Cooling most supercomputers is a major HVAC problem.
Information cannot move faster than the speed of light between two parts of a supercomputer. For this reason, a supercomputer that is many meters across must have latencies between its components measured at least in the tens of nanoseconds. Seymour Cray's supercomputer designs attempted to keep cable runs as short as possible for this reason: hence the cylindrical shape of his Cray range of computers. In modern supercomputers built of many conventional CPUs running in parallel, latencies of 1-5 microseconds to send a message between CPUs are typical.
Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. According to Ken Batcher, "A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems." Much work on external storage bandwidth is needed to ensure that this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Technologies developed for supercomputers include:
Vector processing
Liquid cooling
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
Striped disks (the first instance of what was later called RAID)
Parallel filesystems
[edit] Processing techniques
Vector processing techniques were first developed for supercomputers and continue to be used in specialist high-performance applications. Vector processing techniques have trickled down to the mass market in DSP architectures and SIMD processing instructions for general-purpose computers.
Modern video game consoles in particular use SIMD extensively and this is the basis for some manufacturers' claim that their game machines are themselves supercomputers. Indeed, some graphics cards have the computing power of several TeraFLOPS. The applications to which this power can be applied was limited by the special-purpose nature of early video processing. As video processing has become more sophisticated, Graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved to become more useful as general-purpose vector processors, and an entire computer science sub-discipline has arisen to exploit this capability: General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU.)
[edit] Operating systems
Supercomputers predominantly run some variant of Linux or UNIX. Linux is the most popular since 2004
Supercomputer operating systems, today most often variants of Linux or UNIX, are every bit as complex as those for smaller machines, if not more so. Their user interfaces tend to be less developed, however, as the OS developers have limited programming resources to spend on non-essential parts of the OS (i.e., parts not directly contributing to the optimal utilization of the machine's hardware). This stems from the fact that because these computers, often priced at millions of dollars, are sold to a very small market, their R&D budgets are often limited. (The advent of Unix and Linux allows reuse of conventional desktop software and user interfaces.)
Interestingly this has been a continuing trend throughout the supercomputer industry, with former technology leaders such as Silicon Graphics taking a back seat to such companies as NVIDIA, who have been able to produce cheap, feature-rich, high-performance, and innovative products due to the vast number of consumers driving their R&D.
Historically, until the early-to-mid-1980s, supercomputers usually sacrificed instruction set compatibility and code portability for performance (processing and memory access speed). For the most part, supercomputers to this time (unlike high-end mainframes) had vastly different operating systems. The Cray-1 alone had at least six different proprietary OSs largely unknown to the general computing community. Similarly different and incompatible vectorizing and parallelizing compilers for Fortran existed. This trend would have continued with the ETA-10 were it not for the initial instruction set compatibility between the Cray-1 and the Cray X-MP, and the adoption of UNIX operating system variants (such as Cray's Unicos and today's Linux.)
For this reason, in the future, the highest performance systems are likely to have a UNIX flavor but with incompatible system-unique features (especially for the highest-end systems at secure facilities).
[edit] Programming
The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed. Special-purpose Fortran compilers can often generate faster code than C or C++ compilers, so Fortran remains the language of choice for scientific programming, and hence for most programs run on supercomputers. To exploit the parallelism of supercomputers, programming environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are being used.
[edit] Modern supercomputer architecture
The Columbia Supercomputer at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Facility at Ames Research Center
As of November 2006, the top ten supercomputers on the Top500 list (and indeed the bulk of the remainder of the list) have the same top-level architecture. Each of them is a cluster of MIMD multiprocessors, each processor of which is SIMD. The supercomputers vary radically with respect to the number of multiprocessors per cluster, the number of processors per multiprocessor, and the number of simultaneous instructions per SIMD processor. Within this hierarchy we have:
A computer cluster is a collection of computers that are highly interconnected via a high-speed network or switching fabric. Each computer runs under a separate instance of an Operating System (OS).
A multiprocessing computer is a computer, operating under a single OS and using more than one CPU, where the application-level software is indifferent to the number of processors. The processors share tasks using Symmetric multiprocessing(SMP) and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
An SIMD processor executes the same instruction on more than one set of data at the same time. The processor could be a general purpose commodity processor or special-purpose vector processor. It could also be high performance processor or a low power processor.
As of November 2006, the fastest machine is Blue Gene/L. This machine is a cluster of 65,536 computers, each with two processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently. By contrast, Columbia is a cluster of 20 machines, each with 512 processors, each of which processes two data streams concurrently.
As of 2005, Moore's Law and economies of scale are the dominant factors in supercomputer design: a single modern desktop PC is now more powerful than a 15-year old supercomputer, and the design concepts that allowed past supercomputers to out-perform contemporaneous desktop machines have now been incorporated into commodity PCs. Furthermore, the costs of chip development and production make it uneconomical to design custom chips for a small run and favor mass-produced chips that have enough demand to recoup the cost of production. A current model quad core Xeon workstation running at 2.66Ghz will outperform a multimillion dollar cray C90 supercomputer used in the early 1990s, lots of workloads requiring such a supercomputer in the 1990s can now be done on workstations costing less than 4000 US dollars.
Additionally, many problems carried out by supercomputers are particularly suitable for parallelization (in essence, splitting up into smaller parts to be worked on simultaneously) and, particularly, fairly coarse-grained parallelization that limits the amount of information that needs to be transferred between independent processing units. For this reason, traditional supercomputers can be replaced, for many applications, by "clusters" of computers of standard design which can be programmed to act as one large computer.
[edit] Special-purpose supercomputers
Special-purpose supercomputers are high-performance computing devices with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem. This allows the use of specially programmed FPGA chips or even custom VLSI chips, allowing higher price/performance ratios by sacrificing generality. They are used for applications such as astrophysics computation and brute-force codebreaking. Historically a new special-purpose supercomputer has occasionally been faster than the world's fastest general-purpose supercomputer, by some measure. For example, GRAPE-6 was faster than the Earth Simulator in 2002 for a particular special set of problems.
Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:
Deep Blue, for playing chess
Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of machines
GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher
[edit] The fastest supercomputers today
[edit] Measuring supercomputer speed
The speed of a supercomputer is generally measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (1012 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-,combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (1015 FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.) This measurement is based on a particular benchmark which does LU decomposition of a large matrix. This mimics a class of real-world problems, but is significantly easier to compute than a majority of actual real-world problems.
[edit] The Top500 list
Main article: TOP500
Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the Top500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is the best current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time.
[edit] Current fastest supercomputer system
A BlueGene/P node card
As of August 2007, the IBM Blue Gene/L at LLNL is the fastest operational supercomputer, with a sustained processing rate of 280 TFLOPS.[2][3] [4]
On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer. These computers can sustain one PFLOPS. IBM has announced that several customers will install these systems later in 2007. One of these is likely to become the fastest deployed supercomputer at that time. [1]
The MDGRAPE-3 supercomputer, which was completed in June 2006, reportedly reached one PFLOPS calculation speed, though it may not qualify as a general-purpose supercomputer as its specialized hardware is optimized for molecular dynamics simulations.[5] [6][7]
[edit] Quasi-supercomputing
Some types of large-scale distributed computing for embarrassingly parallel problems take the clustered supercomputing concept to an extreme.
One such example is the BOINC platform, a host for a number of distributed computing projects. On March 27th 2007, BOINC recorded a processing power of over 530.7 TFLOPS through 1,797,000 plus computers on the network.[8] The largest project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home, reported processing power of 276.3 TFLOPS through 1,390,000 plus computers.[9]
Another distributed computing project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home, reported nearly 1.3 PFLOPS of processing power in late September 2007. A little over 1 PFLOPS of this processing power is contributed by clients running on PlayStation 3 systems.[10]
GIMPS's distributed Mersenne Prime search achieves currently 23 TFLOPS (as of October 2007).
Google's search engine system may be faster with estimated total processing power of between 126 and 316 TFLOPS. The New York Times estimates that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers.[11]
[edit] Research and Development
On September 9, 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer to use the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell B.E.) processor aiming to produce a machine capable of a sustained speed of up to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one PFLOPS. Another project in development by IBM is the Cyclops64 architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip".
In India, a project is under the leadership of Dr. Karmarkar is also developing a supercomputer that can reach one PFLOPS.[12]
CDAC is also building a supercomputer that can reach one PFLOPS by 2010.[13]
The NSF is funding a $200 million effort to develop a one petaFLOP supercomputer as well. It is being built by the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is slated to be completed by 2011.[14]
[edit] Timeline of supercomputers
This is a list of the record-holders for fastest general-purpose supercomputer in the world, and the year each one set the record. For entries prior to 1993, this list refers to various sources[citation needed]. From 1993 to present, the list reflects the Top500 listing.
Year
Supercomputer
Peak speed
Location
1942
Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC)
30 OPS
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA
TRE Heath Robinson
200 OPS
Bletchley Park
1944
Flowers Colossus
5 kOPS
Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill
1946
UPenn ENIAC(before 1948+ modifications)
100 kOPS
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA
1954
IBM NORC
67 kOPS
U.S. Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren, Virginia, USA
1956
MIT TX-0
83 kOPS
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA
1958
IBM AN/FSQ-7
400 kOPS
25 U.S. Air Force sites across the continental USA and 1 site in Canada (52 computers)
1960
UNIVAC LARC
250 kFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1961
IBM 7030 "Stretch"
1.2 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA
1964
CDC 6600
3 MFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1969
CDC 7600
36 MFLOPS
1974
CDC STAR-100
100 MFLOPS
1975
Burroughs ILLIAC IV
150 MFLOPS
NASA Ames Research Center, California, USA
1976
Cray-1
250 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA (80+ sold worldwide)
1981
CDC Cyber 205
400 MFLOPS
(numerous sites worldwide)
1983
Cray X-MP/4
941 MFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Battelle; Boeing
1984
M-13
2.4 GFLOPS
Scientific Research Institute of Computer Complexes, Moscow, USSR
1985
Cray-2/8
3.9 GFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
1989
ETA10-G/8
10.3 GFLOPS
Florida State University, Florida, USA
1990
NEC SX-3/44R
23.2 GFLOPS
NEC Fuchu Plant, Fuchu, Japan
1993
Thinking Machines CM-5/1024
65.5 GFLOPS
Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Security Agency
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel
124.50 GFLOPS
National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
Intel Paragon XP/S 140
143.40 GFLOPS
Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1994
Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel
170.40 GFLOPS
National Aerospace Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan
1996
Hitachi SR2201/1024
220.4 GFLOPS
University of Tokyo, Japan
Hitachi/Tsukuba CP-PACS/2048
368.2 GFLOPS
Center for Computational Physics, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
1997
Intel ASCI Red/9152
1.338 TFLOPS
Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico, USA
1999
Intel ASCI Red/9632
2.3796 TFLOPS
2000
IBM ASCI White
7.226 TFLOPS
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA
2002
NEC Earth Simulator
35.86 TFLOPS
Earth Simulator Center, Yokohama-shi, Japan
PEN DRIVES
Carry hard disk in a pen drive
His first tryst with programming was in a computer class at St Paul's English School, Bangalore. That very moment he knew he was made for the world of programming. From then on, Anil Gulecha has been on an aggressive learning mode. The internet and books have been his tutors. He is still learning. But he has already accomplished a unique feat — that of putting a whole operating system on a thumb/pen drive and enabling it to run live on any computer without having to install it on the computer's hard disk. In other words, you can now carry your hard disk or your entire operating system in your pocket. This effort takes computing to a whole new level. Moinak Ghosh, an engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bangalore, recently took the lead on Solaris 10, the flagship operating system of Sun Microsystems, and came up with the version called BeleniX. As TOI reported in July, Moinak took the whole OS and put it together as an abridged LiveCD version. Thanks to the 20-year-old Anil Gulecha, BeleniX can now "boot from a USB thumb drive." The challenge for Anil was to take the existing LiveCD programme and modify it in a way that it identifies USB drives when these are inserted. "You can now buy a thumb drive, visit the BeleniX website and mount the whole OS on to it. You can then carry this with you and use it. We'll now work on enhancements for future versions,"he said. Anil is a third year computer science student at JSS Academy, Bangalore. He worked on BeleniX during his spare time and happened to cross paths with the BeleniX team at a college tech fest, where Sun was organising a contest for hackers. Moinak helped Anil identify the need for BeleniX to be mounted on a thumb drive and then helped him through the project. "This is my first open source project and my first experience with Unix. I'm happy with the outcome and encouraged by Moinak's support,"he said. Anil looks forward to the days when new variants of the OS would make computing more simple and effective. Meanwhile, plenty of accolades have piled up. "Anil has received huge appreciation from the top management at Sun. He has been nominated as one of our technology ambassadors — to talk about Sun technologies in colleges. "We equip these ambassadors with tools and information to work on new technologies and applications,"K P Unnikrishnan, director in Sun Microsystems India, said
His first tryst with programming was in a computer class at St Paul's English School, Bangalore. That very moment he knew he was made for the world of programming. From then on, Anil Gulecha has been on an aggressive learning mode. The internet and books have been his tutors. He is still learning. But he has already accomplished a unique feat — that of putting a whole operating system on a thumb/pen drive and enabling it to run live on any computer without having to install it on the computer's hard disk. In other words, you can now carry your hard disk or your entire operating system in your pocket. This effort takes computing to a whole new level. Moinak Ghosh, an engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bangalore, recently took the lead on Solaris 10, the flagship operating system of Sun Microsystems, and came up with the version called BeleniX. As TOI reported in July, Moinak took the whole OS and put it together as an abridged LiveCD version. Thanks to the 20-year-old Anil Gulecha, BeleniX can now "boot from a USB thumb drive." The challenge for Anil was to take the existing LiveCD programme and modify it in a way that it identifies USB drives when these are inserted. "You can now buy a thumb drive, visit the BeleniX website and mount the whole OS on to it. You can then carry this with you and use it. We'll now work on enhancements for future versions,"he said. Anil is a third year computer science student at JSS Academy, Bangalore. He worked on BeleniX during his spare time and happened to cross paths with the BeleniX team at a college tech fest, where Sun was organising a contest for hackers. Moinak helped Anil identify the need for BeleniX to be mounted on a thumb drive and then helped him through the project. "This is my first open source project and my first experience with Unix. I'm happy with the outcome and encouraged by Moinak's support,"he said. Anil looks forward to the days when new variants of the OS would make computing more simple and effective. Meanwhile, plenty of accolades have piled up. "Anil has received huge appreciation from the top management at Sun. He has been nominated as one of our technology ambassadors — to talk about Sun technologies in colleges. "We equip these ambassadors with tools and information to work on new technologies and applications,"K P Unnikrishnan, director in Sun Microsystems India, said
MUSIC SYSTEMS
Play any song. In any room. From anywhere.
Sonos is the first wireless, multi-room digital music system that lets you play all your favorite music all over your house—and control it all from the palm of your hand. With a wireless Sonos® Controller in hand, you can find and play millions of songs—from select online music and radio services, your personal digital music collection, or all of the above.
And, with Sonos ZonePlayers™ in the rooms of your choice, you can play the same song in different rooms, or different songs in different rooms. To start listening, just grab the full-color Controller and simply pick a room, pick a song and hit play.
With a Sonos Digital Music System you can:
Wirelessly stream all the music you want, all over your house—in up to 32 rooms.
Control all your music in all your rooms from the palm of your hand with a 3.5" full-color LCD screen and scroll wheel.
Find and play millions of songs and stations from select online music and radio services—no ripping, downloading, tagging or PC required.
Liberate the digital music that's stored on your PC, Mac or Network Attached Storage box.
Play the same song in different rooms or different songs in different rooms. Simultaneously.
Wireless, handheld control.
With the Sonos Controller you can instantly access your entire music collection, plus select online music and radio services, from the comfort of your living room couch or dining room chair. No more running to your PC to turn on, change or turn off your music. No need for pointing or line of sight. Use one Controller for your entire house or several for added convenience.
Wireless, multi-room music.With Sonos you can wirelessly stream any song to any room—from the bedroom to the backyard. Just connect ZP80s to your home theater, stereo or any other amplified audio device and put ZP100s and speakers everywhere else you want music. Now you'll have a multi-room digital music system that delivers superior audio all through the house—in up to 32 rooms.
Wireless setup.
You can easily connect a ZoneBridge™ to your router to instantly activate SonosNet™, our secure wireless mesh network. Now all your ZonePlayers and Controllers will work wirelessly and can be placed absolutely anywhere in your house. That’s what we call musical freedom.
A perfect pair.When we set out to create speakers for the Sonos Digital Music System we had three things in mind—acoustics, aesthetics and size. The Sonos Loudspeaker delivers on all three. These high-performance bookshelf speakers provide great sound in a small space and they sure look great doing it.
COMPUTERS
Desktop & Laptop Computers
For personal computers, it will be advised for businesses and government organizations to use desktops in all cases except those where a laptop is more convenient. Also, home users will be advised to use laptops, as they are highly suited for personal use.
very cheap laptop computer ...300 x 288 - 14k - jpgwww.itreviews.co.uk
Laptop computer500 x 447 - 35k - jpgwww.avidimages.com
Laptop computer500 x 447 - 28k - jpgwww.avidimages.com
For personal computers, it will be advised for businesses and government organizations to use desktops in all cases except those where a laptop is more convenient. Also, home users will be advised to use laptops, as they are highly suited for personal use.
very cheap laptop computer ...300 x 288 - 14k - jpgwww.itreviews.co.uk
Laptop computer500 x 447 - 35k - jpgwww.avidimages.com
Laptop computer500 x 447 - 28k - jpgwww.avidimages.com
MP-3
Software , Internet and Networking , June 11 2003, (author: Sameer Pitalwalla) Wouldn t it be nice if you could just browse through hundreds of PCs and explore and get all the music you ever wanted... over your own LAN without the drudgery of scanning each PC manually MP3 Voyeur does just that.
New MP3 player bug News , Security , May 02 2002, (author: ) pageA new 'bug' could hide viruses inside MP3 files. With MP3 music sharing becoming widespread, a code inside a music playing program has been identified that contains a bug, which might allow computer viruses to be concealed within MP3 files. Swedish computer engineer, Andreas Sandblad, found that
New MP3 worm attack News , Security , December 20 2002, (author: Jaison Lewis) pageMusic file swappers may be sharing their computers as well as their favorite songs. Two new security vulnerabilities, disclosed recently, allow an attacker to completely take over a computer system by using malicious music files. The first vulnerability is present in the Microsoft Windows XP operating
WF-200 MP3 player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , February 06 2003, (author: Sucheta Jaywant) An ideal player for those who wish to 'un-tangle' themselves from those screeching wired plugs. It's just the solution for enjoying music minus those annoying wires!
MP-200HD MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , March 27 2003, (author: Sriram Sharma) This MP3 Player has a built-in 20GB HD, USB 2.0 (faster than firewire), FM-Radio and LCD display, all in a package that weighs only 250 grams.
The Techtree School of MP3 Management Guides , Software Guides , May 12 2003, (author: Sameer Pitalwalla) With new artists cropping up every day and his own tastes broadening, how can a techie keep the flowers he loves from blossoming wild How can he make a choice when he can t find Eminem from Barbara Streisand, and Led Zeppelin from Incubus, all lost in the ever-widening collection of confusion
Diva GEM MP3 player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , November 23 2003, (author: R. Mohan) An MP3 player with a difference! Guess what it is This player has got Bluetooth connectivity built-in so that it can be used with a cell phone as a hands-free headset.
Squeezebox Wireless MP3 player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , November 21 2003, (author: R. Mohan) Wireless players might just become the new way of listening to music. Let's welcome one more entrant to this arena of wireless music. Squeezebox from Slimdevices Inc. has just come out with it a wireless MP3 player that can stream digital music (MP3) and Internet radio to your stereo without loss of sound quality
iRiver iFP-599T MP3 player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , December 11 2003, (author: R. Mohan) A compact, high capacity flash player with a capacity of 1GB is what iRiver has just gone on to present to the world. Featured with an integrated FM tuner and voice recorder, this MP3 player can play music up to 34 hours.
MY DJ MP3 Jukebox Techtree.com India , Future Watch , May 02 2004, (author: R. Mohan) Storage, size, music... very common words used these days! At the end of the day they all come to refer to a MP3 player.
Vandisori MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , June 24 2004, (author: Adrian Viegas) MP3 players as fashion accessories have always been a big hit with the fashion conscious trendsetters. This pendant shaped MP3 player from AM Tech Co. promises to catch the attention of all around.
Xpress Digital MP3 Player Entertainment , Portable Audio/Video , June 25 2004, (author: Laiq Qureshi) The surge of Chinese brands in the market is a common feat nowadays, but keeping in mind the implications of cheap portable music players, it bears witness to the fact that these MP3 players are not just back-shelf products anymore. We have already reviewed scores of them, but what puts this baby on our list of appraisal is
Sharp's built-in MP3 Headphones News , Gadgets , July 14 2004, (author: Yohan Contractor) Sharp Electronics has recently introduced an MP3 Headphone unit, which includes an MP3/WMA player with an SD card slot and LCD panel display eliminating the need for accessories to listen to music on the go.
USB MP3 Clock Techtree.com India , Future Watch , July 29 2004, (author: R. Mohan) Reaching office late is quite common these days for me. Two reasons, the 'Bird chirping' alarm (ringtone) on my Samsung C-100 and the beautiful rain every morning.
Sony Moves to MP3 News , Gadgets , September 24 2004, (author: Techtree News Staff) In a strategic move, electronics giant Sony has announced that some of its new music player models will now feature direct support for MP3 audio files.
MP3 Players Fail to Impress News , Gadgets , January 20 2005, (author: Jonah Ramball) MP3 music downloads may rate among the top activities indulged in by Internet users. However, strangely MP3 players, which have been around for quite some time and allow the user to carry their music with ease, have not yet managed to penetrate the common consumer product segment.
Logitec SD MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , February 03 2005, (author: Aalaap Ghag) Is this Future Watch or a Blast From the Past This new portable MP3 player from Logitec (yes, the other one), looks like some 80's hi-fi equipment, or a 90's cellphone, or a 50's radio (only black and much smaller).
M890-33 MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , March 03 2005, (author: Adrian Viegas) While most portable media players today are hard drive-based, you still get flash-based MP3 players coming out in the market. This one is from China-based Shenzhen Mars Technology Co., Ltd.
FreeRIP MP3 2.931 Software , Graphics and Multimedia , March 06 2005, (author: Aalaap Ghag) "How do you convert CDs to MP3s " Helpful by nature, I always try to coach anyone mystified by the complications of making MP3s from CDs, without indulging in overtly technical mumbo jumbo like bitrate, frequency and C2 error correction.
DivX, mp3 Combine News , Software , March 10 2005, (author: Techtree News Staff) xDivXNetworks, the company that created the patent-pending DivX video compression technology has announced a strategic licensing agreement with the inventors of mp3, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, and Thomson, co-inventors of mp3 and exclusive licensing representative for their mp3 patents and software.
Asono Mica MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , March 19 2005, (author: Adrian Viegas) MP3 players have become a universal gizmo. How's this - developed by Norway-based Asono, designed by Norway Says and manufactured in Korea. Well that's the Asono Mica MP3 player for you.
Unlimited Memory MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , April 10 2005, (author: Aalaap Ghag) The player has no built in memory, but works on SD cards, so you simply have to upgrade your cards as new ones come out
Evergreen MP3 Wristwatch Techtree.com India , Future Watch , April 19 2005, (author: Aalaap Ghag) So you like designer watches but want MP3 playback too Most MP3 watches these days are digital and look more geeky than elitist. The Evergreen EGMPW256CII (phew!) may just be what you're looking for.
Mercedes MP3 Watch Techtree.com India , Future Watch , June 02 2005, (author: Aalaap Ghag) If you can't afford the svelte S-Class or the catchy C-Class, here's a (relatively) cheaper W-Class MP3 wrist watch for you.
G-Unit MP3 Watch Techtree.com India , Future Watch , July 20 2005, (author: Niketu Shah) This one definitely doesn't cost 50 cents. If that's what 50 Cent the artist thought while pricing his new MP3 player cum wristwatch.
Martini Shaker MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , July 29 2005, (author: Niketu Shah) A flash memory MP3 player in the shape of a Martini shaker. It features a removable USB port module that houses the flash memory.
Fio MP3 Player Sunglasses Techtree.com India , Future Watch , August 04 2005, (author: Niketu Shah) The Fio MP3 player sunglasses as they are called, feature "3D stereo" sound via ear buds on each side of the frame. The memory capacity goes upto 1GB.
Signeo MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , August 12 2005, (author: Niketu Shah) One more new product in the same line-up is the MP3 player from Signeo. This player, is only unique in the aspect that it is just .68cms thin.
BMW MP3 Sunglasses Techtree.com India , Future Watch , September 27 2005, (author: Techtree Test Labs) At first look, what do they remind you of A Z8 An M5 Oakley Thump Or the Nu Dark Shadow MP3 Sunglasses
Zicplay Slidekey MP3 Player Techtree.com India , Future Watch , October 29 2005, (author: Techtree Test Labs) After Luxpro trying to do a 7280 with their MP3 players, now Swiss Zicplay is trying to pull a D500 with their latest Slidekey MP3 player.
NAME Nokia 3230
MRP. Rs. 14800 (as on 8th September 2005)
Editorial Synopsis
Best VFM smartphone: 1.2MP camera, MP3 Player, FM Radio, not abnormally slow, familiar Series 60 with abundant application availability
Bad quality mono MP3 and FM output, misaligned soft keys and too low a keypad, files can't be beamed to the mem card directly so the 4-4.5mb limit is enforced
Editorial Rating :
Average User Rating : out of (5) Reviews
Average User Rating : NA
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Recommended by 88% MouthShut members
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my oldest cell handset By: ankit_chan Dec 20, 2006 05:57 PM
Nokia 7110 is my oldest cell handset.. My cousin had purchsed that about 7 yrs back.. I had used it about 3 yrs back..It was very costly at that time.. Mostly it was either 17000/- or 27000/-.. I don’t remember the actual price but it was the...
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Detailed Features!'' By: Tricia_Moody Aug 30, 2003 09:41 AM
I won’t waste ur time gibbering about unnecessary stuff about myself . Into the matter directly: I bought this piece from a friend of mmine as i was getting it very cheap. He was going for a new Nokia7650. I bought it because of the excellent...
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A Good Phone By: ajuk Dec 23, 2002 08:01 PM
7110 is a good phone but it is a bit outdated and big. Nokia has phased it out. But this phone has a fairly good battery management and reliable to use. If there is one is avalible in the market and you would like to use it then i will recommend this...
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My Priceless Possession !!!!! By: nitrav Nov 19, 2002 11:10 PM
I was impressed to the core when I first saw the Nokia 7110. It was love at first sight.The moment I saw it I decided that I had to buy it at any cost.But it took me almost 3 months to buy one for myself, thanks to the non-availability of the phone and...
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A beauty By: dennyjos Oct 29, 2002 09:36 AM
I do agree that Nokia 7110 is one of the best phones in the market and others got a long way to go to catch her. To be frank I am not lucky to use one _ but got a friend of mine who roams around with this dame _ very proud. I happened to check her...
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7110 - Best Nokia Phone By: jakosalem Oct 29, 2002 09:14 AM
I think the Nokia 7110 is the best Nokia phone ever. Design - Up until now, the design is still tops compared to other phones. Very unique and stylish. I like large displays and this one is perfect for me. Although bigger than the new models, it is...
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Nice Buy By: akki1977 Sep 04, 2002 02:40 PM
The Nokia 7110 is in my opinion a VERY DYNAMIC product from Nokia. Its a very handy mobile and has lots n lots of storing capacity and nice features. A good buy for anyone i guess. One of the best models Nokia has ever made or for that matter anyone has...
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Not very GREEN as it appears!!! By: paramvir Sep 03, 2002 10:23 AM
The only thing that is good about this mobile phone is that it is WAP enabled. It’s size is so so big though it is slim, it makes it difficult to be carried in the shirt pocket too. I bought it, in fact a friend a mine bought it for me from London paying...
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A W.A.P. users Heaven! By: pawanag Mar 24, 2002 11:53 PM
Nokia 7110 The Features: W.A.P. : This is the World’s first W.A.P. (Wireless Application Protocol) complaint cell phone. It has functions which even the latest W.A.P. phones do not offer. The ‘Large Screen’...
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Nokia 3230 SpecificationSpecification
MRP. Rs. 14800 (as on 8th September 2005)
Editorial Synopsis
Best VFM smartphone: 1.2MP camera, MP3 Player, FM Radio, not abnormally slow, familiar Series 60 with abundant application availability
Bad quality mono MP3 and FM output, misaligned soft keys and too low a keypad, files can't be beamed to the mem card directly so the 4-4.5mb limit is enforced
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Average User Rating : NA
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my oldest cell handset By: ankit_chan Dec 20, 2006 05:57 PM
Nokia 7110 is my oldest cell handset.. My cousin had purchsed that about 7 yrs back.. I had used it about 3 yrs back..It was very costly at that time.. Mostly it was either 17000/- or 27000/-.. I don’t remember the actual price but it was the...
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Detailed Features!'' By: Tricia_Moody Aug 30, 2003 09:41 AM
I won’t waste ur time gibbering about unnecessary stuff about myself . Into the matter directly: I bought this piece from a friend of mmine as i was getting it very cheap. He was going for a new Nokia7650. I bought it because of the excellent...
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A Good Phone By: ajuk Dec 23, 2002 08:01 PM
7110 is a good phone but it is a bit outdated and big. Nokia has phased it out. But this phone has a fairly good battery management and reliable to use. If there is one is avalible in the market and you would like to use it then i will recommend this...
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My Priceless Possession !!!!! By: nitrav Nov 19, 2002 11:10 PM
I was impressed to the core when I first saw the Nokia 7110. It was love at first sight.The moment I saw it I decided that I had to buy it at any cost.But it took me almost 3 months to buy one for myself, thanks to the non-availability of the phone and...
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A beauty By: dennyjos Oct 29, 2002 09:36 AM
I do agree that Nokia 7110 is one of the best phones in the market and others got a long way to go to catch her. To be frank I am not lucky to use one _ but got a friend of mine who roams around with this dame _ very proud. I happened to check her...
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7110 - Best Nokia Phone By: jakosalem Oct 29, 2002 09:14 AM
I think the Nokia 7110 is the best Nokia phone ever. Design - Up until now, the design is still tops compared to other phones. Very unique and stylish. I like large displays and this one is perfect for me. Although bigger than the new models, it is...
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Nice Buy By: akki1977 Sep 04, 2002 02:40 PM
The Nokia 7110 is in my opinion a VERY DYNAMIC product from Nokia. Its a very handy mobile and has lots n lots of storing capacity and nice features. A good buy for anyone i guess. One of the best models Nokia has ever made or for that matter anyone has...
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Not very GREEN as it appears!!! By: paramvir Sep 03, 2002 10:23 AM
The only thing that is good about this mobile phone is that it is WAP enabled. It’s size is so so big though it is slim, it makes it difficult to be carried in the shirt pocket too. I bought it, in fact a friend a mine bought it for me from London paying...
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A W.A.P. users Heaven! By: pawanag Mar 24, 2002 11:53 PM
Nokia 7110 The Features: W.A.P. : This is the World’s first W.A.P. (Wireless Application Protocol) complaint cell phone. It has functions which even the latest W.A.P. phones do not offer. The ‘Large Screen’...
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