Increasing Functional Specificity over Increasingly Commoditized Hardware - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 14

and extranets, and other networks. Internet functions and other applications
are popular high-end server applications, as are integrated enterprise-wide
manufacturing, distribution, and financial applications. Other applications,
like data warehouse management, data mining, and online analytical pro-
cessing are contributing to the demand for high-end server systems.
Mainframe Computers
Mainframe computers are large, fast, and powerful computer systems; they
can process thousands of million instructions per second (MIPS). They can also
have large primary storage capacities with main memory capacity ranging
from hundreds of gigabytes to many terabytes. Mainframes have downsized
drastically in the last few years, dramatically reducing their air-conditioning
needs, electrical power consumption, and floor space requirements—and
thus their acquisition, operating, and ownership costs. Most of these improve-
ments are the result of a move from the cumbersome water-cooled main-
frames to a newer air-cooled technology for mainframe systems.
Mainframe computers continue to handle the information processing
needs of major corporations and government agencies with high transac-
tion processing volumes or complex computational problems. For example,
major international banks, airlines, oil companies, and other large corpora-
tions process millions of sales transactions and customer inquiries every
day with the help of large mainframe systems. Mainframes are still used for
computation-intensive applications, such as analyzing seismic data from oil
field explorations or simulating flight conditions in designing aircraft.
Mainframes are also widely used as superservers for the large client/server
networks and high-volume Internet websites of large companies. Mainframes
are becoming a popular business computing platform for data mining and
warehousing, as well as electronic commerce applications.
Supercomputers
Supercomputers are a category of extremely powerful computer systems spe-
cifically designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications requir-
ing extremely high speeds for massive numeric computations. Supercomputers
use parallel processing architectures of interconnected microprocessors (which
can execute many parallel instructions). They can easily perform arithme-
tic calculations at speeds of billions of floating-point operations per second
( gigalops )—a floating point operation is a basic computer arithmetic operation,
such as addition, on numbers that include a decimal point. Supercomputers
that can calculate in trillions of floating-point operations per second ( tera-
flops), ), which use massive parallel processing (MPP) designs of thousands of
microprocessors, are now in use (see Section 1.4.4 below).
The market for supercomputers includes government research agencies,
large universities, and major corporations. They use supercomputers for
applications such as global weather forecasting, military defence systems,