Read the article "Overview of Recent Super Computers" from Top500.org
(http://www.top500.org/ORSC/).  Answer the following questions.

i) list the Processors you have encountered during your course at UD
that's on the 2002 list of processors.

ii) For most supercomputers over the years, The cost per flops (floating point 
operations per second) has been higher than the same number of flops delivered 
by lower end machines such as desktop computers. Is this true of EarthSimulator?
(Of course a cost premium for supercomputing is justified by the fact that the
computations to be done on the supercomputer simply cannot be done on an 
unorganized collection of lower end machines.)

An intel Pentium3 at 1Ghz delivers about 1.2GFlop/s of performance using 30W 
power.  An UltraSparcIII at 750Mhz delivers a 1.5Gflop/s using 65W.  
A processing element in EarthSimulator (a NEC SX-6) delivers 8GFlop/s at
500Mhz using 135W.  EarthSimulator uses 8*640 of these processing elements
and achieves 40000 gflops peak performance.  Give a rough estimate on the 
operating cost of Earth Simulator versus an equivalent number of either P3 
or UltraSparcs that delivers the same gflops performance.  Operating cost is 
power consumption and other maintenance cost, but ignore other maintenance 
cost.  Just focus on power consumption.  Assume power costs $0.10 per kwh)

iii) (optional) Draw a 5 dimensional hypercube.

If you have questions, please feel free to send e-mail to ask me at
lin@mail.eecis.udel.edu

ps. kwh = "kilowatt hours" = 1000 watts used for an hour.