If a custom massive motherboard for a single machine would be made with connections for hundreds of CPU, GPU and RAM sticks, could regular BIOS recognize all of them and Windows OS be installed on that machine?
If so, would Windows be able to use all of that computing power?
If not what additional things would need to be done to make use of such components on a single machine? Custom BIOS, custom OS?
I am aware that there are many applications which require much more computations that running a PC game but I am still interested if some games could then run at the tens of thousands of frames per second?
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Depends on your definition of supercomputer but many larger servers can run Windows while having multiples CPUs/GPUs/etc. At that size you are correct, you’d need a custom massive motherboard but some companies use them.
Windows has limited ability to use all of that computing power though which is why the largest supercomputers don’t use Windows.
You’d need some sort of Linux that’s optimized for multiple CPUs as well as for each individual program to be optimized for multiple CPUs.
Simply having the right OS wouldn’t allow you to use all your CPUs at once if the individual programs aren’t optimized that way.
Games can’t really do that for example, since they have to wait for user input before calculating the next frame. In fact, with multiple CPUs/GPUs you get a lot of lag. So instead of running one game at thousands of FPS, you’d be able to run thousands of games simultaneously at slightly slower FPS.
> custom massive motherboard
Depending on your definition of custom it may not be suitable for any OS avaliable, basically all OS assume some architecture in place so going to far from that would made this theoretical piece of electronic useless.
> hundreds of cpu… gpu…
If you talking about cores its fine, if you talking about separate processors no, as previously architecture, you can’t have (generaly) more than one processor in a machine. gpu too unless they work as one.
>would windows be able to use
if you dont mess up architecture, doesn’t exceed in OS limts that specyfy max ram that can be managed, windows should be able to utylize resources
>if not
Custom os custom bios custom protocols custom everything
>would it run a game
i ll assume scenariowith typical moder supercomputer
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh, no, because many reasons
whole point of that kind of computer isn’t to run one single or few threaded application, but tu run multiple things in parallel at once. Games are terrible in utylizing resources, and usually use only a few threads so wouldn’t benefit from that hardware, windows is also terrible inefficient in managing resources so it would use linux (but that’s not a problem, vine exists), supercomputers also havestructure more like problem in, solving, result, while games need to have as low input lag as possible, but if you d optymize an instance you could just generate a lot of frames, that would be hard to send bc your internet bandwidth wouldn’t be able to handle them without compression which defeats the whole point
[Windows has been a thing on some supercomputers](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg/2880px-Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg.png)
Modern supercomputers aren’t some giant moderboard with a thousand CPUs on it, but more or less a lot of normal hardware in a particular configuration. It’s many quite normal computers working together, and yeah, you could probably boot Windows on one of those.
Supercomputers are just computers with lots of RAM, CPU/GPU capacity, storage, etc.
Windows 11 Home Edition can handle a max of 128GB of RAM and 64 CPU cores While that is a huge amount for most people, I wouldn’t call it a supercomputer.
Windows 11 Pro can handle 2 TB of RAM and 128 Cores. and Windows 11 Pro for Workstations can handle 6 TB of RAM, 256 cores, and 4 physically separate CPUs. That’s getting closer to supercomputer territory but Microsoft still calls it a workstation rather than a supercomputer.
So the best PC that can run windows is 4 CPUs with 64 cores each, and 6 TB of RAM. Thats still pretty far off from the average supercomputer.
Supercomputers are usually made of multiple racks full of computers. Hundreds of high performance computers working on the same problem. These could run windows, though it wouldn’t be the best tool for the job. But each instance of Windows would still not be a supercomputer, you’d have to consider the entire room full of computers to be one supercomputer.
Yes, there are several examples of supercomputers (Cray built one!) running Windows. It isn’t common, but they can do it. They even have scalable file systems now that can roughly mimic ZFS. I don’t know of anyone doing it, as massively parallel applications tend to run Linux based software. That doesn’t preclude Windows since most of those have Windows ports, but why pay MS when you can use it for free?
Most supercomputers aren’t a single computer with tons of processors and other resources. They are clusters of individual computers (called nodes) linked together, often out of off-the-shelf hardware. They aren’t really useful for doing one thing, like playing a game, but instead they are really good at working on things that can be split up into small pieces that can be worked on at the same time and then put back together.
Each of the nodes in a cluster will run its own OS and use its own resources, so it is possible for the nodes to run Windows, but it is probably not going to be the best choice.
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