A super cluster consisting of many super computers that are tightly packed together connected and worked together in processing huge amount of data.

It would be like a million bees working together to make honey in the hive, that is the amount of work going on in a supercomputer .

Supercomputing is something that is highly expensive and till date serves specialized purposes in scientific research, defense and weather simulations.

Supercomputers are used in complex number crunching operations and simulations that would take a normal desktop months or even years to perform.

Supercomputers

This concept of computing came about in the 1960’s when Seymour Cray and a few members at Control Data Corporation created the earliest supercomputer, CDC 6600 and over time develop more supercomputers at CDC.

For supercomputers, the processing capacity increased while the size of the processor that carried out these processes decreased. Over the due course of time, it made room for more work and less space was required in terms of facilities and now many research institutions and defense establishments house these supercomputers.

An ordinary computer computes at 1 kiloflop(1000 flops). The fastest supercomputer as of 2012, IBM Sequoia computes at 16.32 petabytes (16*10¹⁵) this would be averagely 17 lakh desktop computers computing at the same time. It would be able to complete complex calculations in a day which otherwise would take 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete.

Computing in day to day life seems simple with communication, work and entertainment.

But as computers and technology grow smaller and smaller with miniaturization ,a modern graphics card would carry the same work a supercomputer can do nowadays through parallel computing which allows for physics simulations for games at the same time can run tasks like cryptography, sequencing  and other tasks.

Possibility of computing on the large scale is limited by its initial applications being restricted to the science community, but it is soon finding general purpose applications as both scientists and the public look for possibilities to put supercomputing into the wider benefit of human life rather than restricted scientific research.

[source]

Election Process

An election is held between bridges (also argued as switches) that compare each other’s bridge identifier (ID) known as the root bridge election. The bridge with the lowest bridge ID is elected as the root bridge (the winner!). The root bridge is at the center of convergence within a layer-2 topology running the Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP). As with most elections, the candidates first advertise themselves as the winner. These bridge ID ‘advertisements’ are packaged in what’s known as a Bridge Protocol Data Unit (BPDU), along with other information, by each participating bridge. The BPDU’s are then sent to all participants where the bridge ID is ‘unpacked’ (or more accurately read from the BPDU) and compared against their own. If a bridge receives an advertised bridge ID that’s better than its own, it concedes defeat and advertises the winner in subsequent BPDUs as the root bridge.

Criteria

The bridge ID is an 8-Byte (64 bit) value composed of the following elements:

• The bridge priority value and the system ID extension together make up a 16 bit (2-byte) value. The bridge priority value, making up the left most bits, is a value of 0 to 61440. The extended system ID is a value of 1 to 4095 corresponding to the respective VLAN participating in STP. The bridge priority value increments in blocks of 4096 to allow the system ID extension to squeeze in between each increment. By default, Cisco’s Per-VLAN Spanning-Tree plus (PVST+) adds this system ID extension (sys-id-ext) to the bridge priority.

• The 48 bit (6-byte) MAC address of the switch is used in conjunction with the bridge priority value and the system ID extension as criteria for the root bridge election. If the bridge priority value and the system ID extension are identical on two or more switches the lowest 48-bit MAC address is then used as a tie breaker.

These values together make up the cohesive Bridge Identifier used to elect the root bridge. The following Wireshark packet capture of a BPDU illustrates these values. The bridge priority and system ID extension are the 16-bit hexadecimal value 80 01 representing the bridge priority value of 32768 and a system ID extension of 1.

Example

The example below shows a fully converged layer-2 network with four switches that have an identical bridge priority value and system ID extension. SW2′s MAC address is the lowest value of the four, breaking the tie, making SW2 the root bridge.

Kohls: these remind me of the Anthropologie farmers market baskets.

TJ Maxx: I really really wanted this purple (looks blue) wallet, but it’s a little big, maybe I will change my mind.

World Market: I carries these around, but ended up putting them back.

Cloud-based tv service Magine launches Monday, March 25th in Sweden. Raised $8.3M in seed funding and spent three years building a cloud-based alternative to cable tv. Clicker

DecisionDesk nets $1.7M to help colleges & companies pick the best people. Exclusive

March Madness is a gamble for advertisers. Chance

TestFlight + Burstly launch FlightPath, closing the loop for mobile devs with post-launch analytics. SayWhat

Coupons.com acquires KitchMe. Clubcard

7 tips for layering professional services revenue into your startup. Tips

Pandora makes Windows Phone 8 debut and gives users ad-free music through end of year. Music

Toronto HR Startup ClearFit raises $7M Series A to grow hiring software for small business offering. Canada

Nearpod gets $1.5M from NewSchools, salesforce exec to bring its mobile “PowerPoint on Steroids” to classrooms. NextSlide

Vidyard raises $6M Series A led by OMERS Ventures to build out its video marketing & analytics platform. NextStage

Pinterest acquires mobile startup Livestar. PinThis

And yes, that’s everything except the kitchen sink. Hope you enjoy and get your fill. Be back tomorrow. Follow us on Twitter @the7thround. Start telling your friends. Go ahead… it won’t hurt.

-Us.

Using this infomation, we can try this example question: