COMPUTER HIERARCHY

COMPUTER HIERARCHY
Definition of Computer Hierarchy:
Computer Hierarchy is the structural graph of
arrangements of various types of computers
depending on the speed computers depending on the
speed, size, capability to support number of users on
network etc.
COMPUTER HIERARCHY
Supercomput
er

Mainframe
Computer

Midrange
Computer

Structure of
Computer Hierarchy
Workstation

Microcomput
er
1. Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the

frontline of current processing capacity, particularly
speed of calculation.
1. Supercomputer

The Columbia Supercomputer,

located at the
NASA Ames Research Center
1. Supercomputer
Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and
were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at
Control Data Corporation (CDC), which 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). In the 1980s a large number of smaller
competitors entered the market, in parallel to the
creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier,
but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s
"supercomputer market crash".
1. Supercomputer

Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind

custom designs produced by "traditional" companies
such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had
purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their
experience. As of May 2010[update], the Cray Jaguar is the
fastest supercomputer in the world.

IBM Roadrunner - LANL

1. Supercomputer

The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and

today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's
ordinary 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 to become the standard.
1. Supercomputer
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.
1. Supercomputer
Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf"
server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC,
Opteron, or Xeon, and coprocessors like NVIDIA Tesla
GPGPUs, AMD GPUs, IBM Cell, FPGAs. Most modern
supercomputers are now highly-tuned
computer clusters using commodity processors
combined with custom interconnects.
1. Supercomputer

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-

intensive tasks such as problems involving
quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate
research, 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).

A Blue Gene/P node card

1. Supercomputer

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.
1. Supercomputer

Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:

Belle, Deep Blue, and Hydra, for playing chess
Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of
machines
GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher
MDGRAPE-3, for protein structure computation
D. E. Shaw Research Anton, for simulating
molecular dynamics
2. Mainframe computer

An IBM 704 mainframe

2. Mainframe computer

Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as

Big Iron) are powerful computers used mainly by
large organizations for critical applications, typically
bulk data processing such as census, industry and
consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and
financial transaction processing.
2. Mainframe computer

The term originally referred to the large cabinets

that housed the central processing unit and main
memory of early computers. Later the term was used to
distinguish high-end commercial machines from less
powerful units.
2. Mainframe computer

Most large-scale computer system architectures

were firmly established in the 1960s and most large
computers were based on architecture established
during that era up until the advent of Web servers in
the 1990s. (The first Web server running anywhere
outside Switzerland ran on an IBM mainframe at
Stanford University as early as 1991. See
History of the World Wide Web for details.)
2. Mainframe computer

There were several minicomputer operating

systems and architectures that arose in the 1970s and
1980s, but minicomputers are generally not considered
mainframes. (UNIX arose as a minicomputer operating
system; Unix has scaled up over the years to acquire
some mainframe characteristics.)
2. Mainframe computer

Many defining characteristics of "mainframe" were

established in the 1960s, but those characteristics
continue to expand and evolve to the present day.
2. Mainframe computer

Modern mainframe computers have abilities not so

much defined by their single task computational speed
(usually defined as MIPS — Millions of Instructions Per
Second) as by their redundant internal engineering and
resulting high reliability and security, extensive input-
output facilities, strict backward compatibility with
older software, and high utilization rates to support
massive throughput. These machines often run for
years without interruption, with repairs and hardware
upgrades taking place during normal operation.
2. Mainframe computer

Nearly all mainframes have the ability to run (or

host) multiple operating systems, and thereby operate
not as a single computer but as a number of
virtual machines. In this role, a single mainframe can
replace dozens or even hundreds of smaller servers.
While mainframes pioneered this capability,
virtualization is now available on most families of
computer systems, though not always to the same
degree or level of sophistication.
2. Mainframe computer

Differences from supercomputers

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of
current processing capacity, particularly speed of
calculation. Supercomputers are used for scientific and
engineering problems (Grand Challenge problems)
which are limited by processing speed and memory size,
while mainframes are used for problems which are
limited by data movement in input/output devices,
reliability, and for handling multiple business
transactions concurrently. The differences are as follows:
2. Mainframe computer

Differences from supercomputers

The differences are as follows:
• Mainframes are measured in millions of instructions per second
(MIPS) while assuming typical instructions are integer
operations, but supercomputers are measured in floating point
operations per second (FLOPS). Examples of integer operations
include adjusting inventory counts, matching names, indexing
tables of data, and making routine yes or no decisions. Floating
point operations are mostly addition, subtraction, and
multiplication with enough digits of precision to model
continuous phenomena such as weather. In terms of
computational ability, supercomputers are more powerful.
2. Mainframe computer

Differences from supercomputers

The differences are as follows:
Mainframes are built to be reliable for transaction processing as
it is commonly understood in the business world: a commercial
exchange of goods, services, or money. A typical transaction, as
defined by the Transaction Processing Performance Council,[11]
would include the updating to a database system for such things
as inventory control (goods), airline reservations (services), or
banking (money). A transaction could refer to a set of operations
including disk read/writes, operating system calls, or some form
of data transfer from one subsystem to another.
3. Midrange computer

Midrange computers, or midrange systems, are

a class of computer systems which fall in between
mainframe computers and microcomputers. The range
emerged in the 1960s and were more generally known
at the time as minicomputers. Notable midrange
computer lines include
Digital Equipment Corporation (PDP line),
Data General, Hewlett-Packard (HP3000 line), IBM (
System/3 and successors), and Sun Microsystems (
SPARC Enterprise).
3. Midrange computer

IBM has made several models of midrange

computers over these years: the System/3, System/34,
System/32, System/36, System/38, and AS/400, which
was recently rebranded to System i.
Historically, midrange computers have been sold to
small to medium-sized businesses as their main
computer, and to larger enterprises for branch- or
department-level operations.
3. Midrange computer

Since 1990s, when the client–server model of

computing became predominant, computers of the
comparable class are instead universally known as
servers to recognize that they "serve" end users at their
"client" computers. Since the client–server model was
developed in Unix-like operating systems, using this
term frequently implies support of standard—rather
than proprietary—protocols and programming
interfaces.
4. Workstation
A workstation is a high-end microcomputer
designed for technical or scientific applications.
Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time,
they are commonly connected to a local area network
and run multi-user operating systems. The term
workstation has also been used to refer to a
mainframe computer terminal or a PC connected to a
network.
4. Workstation
Historically, workstations had offered higher
performance than personal computers, especially with
respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity and
multitasking capability. They are optimized for the
visualization and manipulation of different types of
complex data such as 3D mechanical design,
engineering simulation (e.g.
computational fluid dynamics), animation and
rendering of images, and mathematical plots
4. Workstation
Consoles consist of a high resolution display, a
keyboard and a mouse at a minimum, but also offer
multiple displays, graphics tablets, 3D mice (devices
for manipulating and navigating 3D objects and
scenes), etc. Workstations are the first segment of the
computer market to present advanced accessories and
collaboration tools.
4. Workstation
Presently, the workstation market is highly
commoditized and is dominated by large PC vendors,
such as Dell and HP, selling Microsoft Windows/
Linux running on Intel Xeon/AMD Opteron.
Alternative UNIX based platforms are provided by
Apple Inc., Sun Microsystems, and SGI.
4. Workstation
Sun SPARCstation 1+,
25 MHz RISC processor from
early 1990s
5. Microcomputer

A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor

as its central processing unit. They are physically small
compared to mainframe and minicomputers. Many
microcomputers (when equipped with a keyboard and
screen for input and output) are also
personal computers (in the generic sense).
5. Microcomputer

Monitors, keyboards and other devices for input and

output may be integrated or separate. Computer
memory in the form of RAM, and at least one other less
volatile, memory storage device are usually combined
with the CPU on a system bus in a single unit. Other
devices that make up a complete microcomputer
system include, batteries, a power supply unit, a
keyboard and various input/output devices used to
convey information to and from a human operator (
printers, monitors, human interface devices)
5. Microcomputer

Microcomputers are designed to serve only a single

user at a time, although they can often be modified
with software or hardware to concurrently serve more
than one user. Microcomputers fit well on or under
desks or tables, so that they are within easy access of
the user. Bigger computers like minicomputers,
mainframes, and supercomputers take up large
cabinets or even a dedicated room.
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