The Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Lab runs over 250,000 processors using normal data center air conditioning, grouped in 72 racks/cabinets connected by a high-speed, optical network^[1]

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and later at Cray Research. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm.^[2][3]

Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths: in one approach, e.g. in grid computing the processing power of a large number of computers in distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available.^[4] In another approach, a large number of processors are used in close proximity to each other, e.g. in a computer cluster. The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging direction.^[5][6] Currently, Japan's K computer (a cluster) is the fastest in the world.^[7]

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion).

History[link]

A Cray-1 preserved at the Deutsches Museum

The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance.^[8] The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer.^[9][10]

Cray left CDC in 1972 to form his own company.^[11] Four years after leaving CDC, Cray delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1 in 1976, and it became one of the most successful supercomputers in history.^[12][13] The Cray-2 released in 1985 was an 8 processor liquid cooled computer and Fluorinert was pumped through it as it operated. It performed at 1.9 gigaflops and was the world's fastest until 1990.^[14]

While the supercomputers of the 1980s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear both in the United States and in Japan, setting new computational performance records. Fujitsu's Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer used 166 vector processors to gain the top spot in 1994 with a peak speed of 1.7 gigaflops per processor.^[15][16] The Hitachi SR2201 obtained a peak performance of 600 gigaflops in 1996 by using 2048 processors connected via a fast three dimensional crossbar network.^[17][18][19] The Intel Paragon could have 1000 to 4000 Intel i860 processors in various configurations, and was ranked the fastest in the world in 1993. The Paragon was a MIMD machine which connected processors via a high speed two dimensional mesh, allowing processes to execute on separate nodes; communicating via the Message Passing Interface.^[20]

Hardware and architecture[link]

A Blue Gene/L cabinet showing the stacked blades, each holding many processors

Approaches to supercomputer architecture have taken dramatic turns since the earliest systems were introduced in the 1960s. Early supercomputer architectures pioneered by Seymour Cray relied on compact innovative designs and local parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance.^[8] However, in time the demand for increased computational power ushered in the age of massively parallel systems.

While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s, machines with thousands of processors began to appear and by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm. Supercomputers of the 21st century can use over 100,000 processors (some being graphic units) connected by fast connections.^[2][3]

Throughout the decades, the management of heat density has remained a key issue for most centralized supercomputers.^[21][22][23] The large amount of heat generated by a system may also have other effects, e.g. reducing the lifetime of other system components.^[24] There have been diverse approaches to heat management, from pumping Fluorinert through the system, to a hybrid liquid-air cooling system or air cooling with normal air conditioning temperatures.^[14][25]

The CPU share of TOP500

Systems with a massive number of processors generally take one of two paths: in one approach, e.g. in grid computing the processing power of a large number of computers in distributed, diverse administrative domains, is opportunistically used whenever a computer is available.^[4] In another approach, a large number of processors are used in close proximity to each other, e.g. in a computer cluster. In such a centralized massively parallel system the speed and flexibility of the interconnect becomes very important and modern supercomputers have used various approaches ranging from enhanced Infiniband systems to three-dimensional torus interconnects.^[26][27] The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging direction, e.g. as in the Cyclops64 system.^[5][6]

As the price/performance of general purpose graphic processors (GPGPUs) has improved, a number of petaflop supercomputers such as Tianhe-I and Nebulae have started to rely on them.^[28] However, other systems such as the K computer continue to use conventional processors such as SPARC-based designs and the overall applicability of GPGPUs in general purpose high performance computing applications has been the subject of debate, in that while a GPGPU maybe tuned to score well on specific benchmarks its overall applicability to everyday algorithms may be limited unless significant effort is spent to tune the application towards it.^[29] However, GPUs are gaining ground and in 2012 the Jaguar supercomputer was transformed into Titan by replacing CPUs with GPUs.^[30][31][32]

A number of "special-purpose" systems have been designed, 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. Examples of special-purpose supercomputers include Belle,^[33] Deep Blue,^[34] and Hydra,^[35] for playing chess, Gravity Pipe for astrophysics,^[36] MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure computation molecular dynamics^[37] and Deep Crack,^[38] for breaking the DES cipher.

Energy usage and heat management[link]

A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which is converted into heat, requiring cooling. For example, Tianhe-1A consumes 4.04 Megawatts of electricity.^[39] The cost to power and cool the system can be significant, e.g. 4MW at $0.10/KWh is $400 an hour or about $3.5 million per year.

An IBM HS20 blade

Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices, and affects powerful computer systems in various ways.^[40] The thermal design power and CPU power dissipation issues in supercomputing surpass those of traditional computer cooling technologies. The supercomputing awards for green computing reflect this issue.^{[41] [42][43]}

The packing of thousands of processors together inevitably generates significant amounts of heat density that need to be dealt with. The Cray 2 was liquid cooled, and used a Fluorinert "cooling waterfall" which was forced through the modules under pressure.^[14] However, the submerged liquid cooling approach was not practical for the multi-cabinet systems based on off-the-shelf processors, and in System X a special cooling system that combined air conditioning with liquid cooling was developed in conjunction with the Liebert company.^[25]

In the Blue Gene system IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density.^[44] On the other hand, the IBM Power 775, released in 2011, has closely packed elements that require water cooling.^[45] The IBM Aquasar system, on the other hand uses hot water cooling to achieve energy efficiency, the water being used to heat buildings as well.^[46][47]

The energy efficiency of computer systems is generally measured in terms of "FLOPS per Watt". In 2008 IBM's Roadrunner operated at 376 MFLOPS/Watt.^[48][49] In November 2010, the Blue Gene/Q reached 1684 MFLOPS/Watt.^[50][51] In June 2011 the top 2 spots on the Green 500 list were occupied by Blue Gene machines in New York (one achieving 2097 MFLOPS/W) with the DEGIMA cluster in Nagasaki placing third with 1375 MFLOPS/W.^[52]

Software and system management[link]

Operating systems[link]

Since the end of the 20th century, supercomputer operating systems have undergone major transformations, as sea changes have taken place in supercomputer architecture.^[53] While early operating systems were custom tailored to each supercomputer to gain speed, the trend has been to move away from in-house operating systems to the adaptation of generic software such as Linux.^[54]

Given that modern massively parallel supercomputers typically separate computations from other services by using multiple types of nodes, they usually run different operating systems on different nodes, e.g. using a small and efficient lightweight kernel such as CNK or CNL on compute nodes, but a larger system such as a Linux-derivative on server and I/O nodes.^[55][56][57]

While in a traditional multi-user computer system job scheduling is in effect a tasking problem for processing and peripheral resources, in a massively parallel system, the job management system needs to manage the allocation of both computational and communication resources, as well as gracefully dealing with inevitable hardware failures when tens of thousands of processors are present.^[58]

Although most modern supercomputers use the Linux operating system, each manufacturer has made its own specific changes to the Linux-derivative they use, and no industry standard exists, partly due to the fact that the differences in hardware architectures require changes to optimize the operating system to each hardware design.^[53][59]

Software tools[link]

The parallel architectures of supercomputers often dictate the use of special programming techniques to exploit their speed.

In the most common scenario, environments such as PVM and MPI for loosely connected clusters and OpenMP for tightly coordinated shared memory machines are used. Significant effort is required to optimize an algorithm for the interconnect characteristics of the machine it will be run on; the aim is to prevent any of the CPUs from wasting time waiting on data from other nodes. GPGPUs have hundreds of processor cores and are programmed using programming models such as CUDA.

Software tools for distributed processing include standard APIs such as MPI and PVM, VTL, and open source-based software solutions such as Beowulf.

Distributed supercomputing[link]

Opportunistic approaches[link]

Example architecture of a grid computing system connecting many personal computers over the internet

Opportunistic Supercomputing is a form of networked grid computing whereby a “super virtual computer” of many loosely coupled volunteer computing machines performs very large computing tasks. Grid computing has been applied to a number of large-scale embarrassingly parallel problems that require supercomputing performance scales. However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing can not handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations.

The fastest grid computing system is the distributed computing project Folding@home. F@h reported 8.1 petaflops of x86 processing power as of March 2012^[update]. Of this, 5.8 petaflops are contributed by clients running on various GPUs, 1.7 petaflops come from PlayStation 3 systems, and the rest from various CPU systems.^[60]

The BOINC platform hosts a number of distributed computing projects. As of May 2011^[update], BOINC recorded a processing power of over 5.5 petaflops through over 480,000 active computers on the network^[61] The most active project (measured by computational power), MilkyWay@home, reports processing power of over 700 teraflops through over 33,000 active computers.^[62]

As of May 2011^[update], GIMPS's distributed Mersenne Prime search currently achieves about 60 teraflops through over 25,000 registered computers.^[63] The Internet PrimeNet Server supports GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest and most successful grid computing projects, since 1997.

Quasi-opportunistic approaches[link]

Quasi-opportunistic Supercomputing is a form of distributed computing whereby the “super virtual computer” of a large number of networked geographically disperse computers performs huge processing power demanding computing tasks.^[64] Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing aims to provide a higher quality of service than opportunistic grid computing by achieving more control over the assignment of tasks to distributed resources and the use of intelligence about the availability and reliability of individual systems within the supercomputing network. However, quasi-opportunistic distributed execution of demanding parallel computing software in grids should be achieved through implementation of grid-wise allocation agreements, co-allocation subsystems, communication topology-aware allocation mechanisms, fault tolerant message passing libraries and data pre-conditioning.^[64]

Performance measurement[link]

Capability vs capacity[link]

Supercomputers generally aim for the maximum in capability computing rather than capacity computing. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a single large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can, e.g. a very complex weather simulation application.^[65]

Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve a small number of somewhat large problems or a large number of small problems, e.g. many user access requests to a database or a web site.^[65] Architectures that lend themselves to supporting many users for routine everyday tasks may have a lot of capacity but are not typically considered supercomputers, given that they do not solve a single very complex problem.^[65]

Performance metrics[link]

Top supercomputer speeds: logscale speed over 60 years

In general, the speed of supercomputers is measured and benchmarked in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations Per Second), and not in terms of MIPS, i.e. as "instructions per second", as is the case with general purpose computers.^[66] These measuremens are commonly used with an SI prefix such as tera-, combined into the shorthand "TFLOPS" (10¹² FLOPS, pronounced teraflops), or peta-, combined into the shorthand "PFLOPS" (10¹⁵ FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.) "Petascale" supercomputers can process one quadrillion (10¹⁵) (1000 trillion) FLOPS. Exascale is computing performance in the exaflops range. An exaflop is one quintillion (10¹⁸) FLOPS (one million teraflops).

No single number can reflect the overall performance of a computer system, yet the goal of the Linpack benchmark is to approximate how fast the computer solves numerical problems and it is widely used in the industry.^[67] The FLOPS measurement is either quoted based on the theoretical floating point performance of a processor (derived from manufacturer's processor specifications and shown as "Rpeak" in the TOP500 lists) which is generally unachievable when running real workloads, or the achievable throughput, derived from the LINPACK benchmarks and shown as "Rmax" in the TOP500 list. The LINPACK benchmark typically performs LU decomposition of a large matrix. The LINPACK performance gives some indication of performance for some real-world problems, but does not necessarily match the processing requirements of many other supercomputer workloads, which for example may require more memory bandwidth, or may require better integer computing performance, or may need a high performance I/O system to achieve high levels of performance.^[67]

The TOP500 list[link]

14 countries account for the vast majority of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, with over half being located in the United States.

Since 1993, the fastest supercomputers have been ranked on the TOP500 list according to their LINPACK benchmark results. The list does not claim to be unbiased or definitive, but it is a widely cited current definition of the "fastest" supercomputer available at any given time.

This is a recent list of the computers which appeared at the top of the Top500 list,^[68] and the "Peak speed" is given as the "Rmax" rating. For more historical data see History of supercomputing.

The K computer is the worlds fastest supercomputer at 10.51 petaflops. It consists of 88,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, and spans 864 server racks. In November 2011, the power consumption was reported to be 12659.89 kW^[69] The operating costs for the system are about $10M per year.^[70]

Applications of supercomputers[link]

The stages of supercomputer application may be summarized in the following table:

The IBM Blue Gene/P computer has been used to simulate a number of artificial neurons equivalent to approximately one percent of a human cerebral cortex, containing 1.6 billion neurons with approximately 9 trillion connections. The same research group also succeeded in using a supercomputer to simulate a number of artificial neurons equivalent to the entirety of a rat's brain.^[77]

Modern-day weather forecasting also relies on supercomputers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses supercomputers to crunch hundreds of millions of observations to help make weather forecasts more accurate.^[78]

In 2011, the challenges and difficulties in pushing the envelope in supercomputing were underscored by IBM's abandonment of the Blue Waters petascale project.^[79]

Research and development trends[link]

Diagram of a 3 dimensional torus interconnect used by systems such as Blue Gene, Cray XT3, etc.

IBM is developing the Cyclops64 architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip". IBM is also constructing a 20 PFLOPs supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, named Sequoia, based on the Blue Gene architecture which is scheduled to go online in 2012.

Given the current speed of progress, supercomputers are projected to reach 1 exaflops (10¹⁸) (one quintillion FLOPS) in 2019.^[80] Using the Intel MIC multi-core processor architecture, which is Intel's response to GPU systems, SGI plans to achieve a 500 times increase in performance by 2018 to achieve an exaflop.^[81] Samples of MIC chips with 32 cores which combine vector processing units with standard CPU have become available.^[81]

On October 11, 2011, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced they were building a 20 petaflop supercomputer, named Titan, which will become operational in 2012, the hybrid Titan system will combine AMD Opteron processors with Nvidia GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphic processing unit (GPU) technologies.^[30] At about the same time Fujitsu announced that the 20 peta flop follow up system for the K computer, called the PRIMEHPC FX10 will use the same 6 dimensional torus interconnect, but still only one SPARC processor per node.^[82]

Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories theorizes that a zettaflops (10²¹) (one sextillion FLOPS) computer is required to accomplish full weather modeling, which could cover a two week time span accurately.^[83] Such systems might be built around 2030.^[84]

The Indian government has stated that they committed about $940 million to develop what could become the world's fastest supercomputer by 2017, if the plans succeed. According to the Planning Commission of India, ISRO and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore have planned to develop a supercomputer with a performance of 132.8 exaflops, about 1,000 times faster than the 2012 fastest computers.^[85]

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Supercomputers

• Jungle computing
• SC (conference)
• Supercomputer architecture
• Supercomputing in China
• Supercomputing in India
• Supercomputing in Europe
• Supercomputing in Japan
• TOP500
• The Journal of Supercomputing

Notes[link]

v t e Parallel computing General Cloud computing High-performance computing Cluster computing Distributed computing Grid computing Levels Bit Instruction Data Task Threads Superthreading Hyperthreading Theory Amdahl's law Gustafson's law Cost efficiency Karp–Flatt metric slowdown speedup Elements Process Thread Fiber PRAM Instruction window Coordination Multiprocessing Multithreading (computer architecture) Memory coherency Cache coherency Cache invalidation Barrier Synchronization Application checkpointing Programming Models Implicit parallelism Explicit parallelism Concurrency Flynn's taxonomy SISD SIMD MISD MIMD SPMD Thread (computer science) Non-blocking algorithm Hardware Multiprocessor Symmetric Asymmetric Memory NUMA COMA distributed shared distributed shared SMT MPP Superscalar Vector processor Supercomputer Beowulf APIs Ateji PX POSIX Threads OpenMP OpenHMPP PVM MPI UPC Intel Threading Building Blocks Boost.Thread Global Arrays Charm++ Cilk Co-array Fortran OpenCL CUDA Dryad Problems Embarrassingly parallel Grand Challenge Software lockout Scalability Race conditions Deadlock Livelock Deterministic algorithm Parallel slowdown Category Commons

Ant & Dec in 2009

Anthony McPartlin (born 18 November 1975) and Declan Donnelly (born 25 September 1975), known collectively as Ant & Dec, are an English comedy and TV presenting duo from Newcastle upon Tyne, England.^[1] The duo first rose to fame as actors on the children's television show Byker Grove, during which and in their subsequent pop career they were respectively known as PJ & Duncan – the names of the characters they played on the show. Since then, Ant & Dec have had a very successful career as TV presenters, presenting shows such as SMTV Live, Friends Like These, Pop Idol, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, PokerFace, Push the Button, Britain's Got Talent, Red or Black? and Text Santa. They have also returned to acting, starring in a 2002 Tribute to The Likely Lads and the 2006 film Alien Autopsy.

Ant is the taller of the two at 5'8" (1.73 m) and Dec is two inches shorter at 5'6" (1.68 m). It is a running joke that many people do not know who is Ant and who is Dec, even though their appearances differ significantly. To assist with identification, they follow the 180 degree rule; all their TV appearances and publicity photos have Ant on the left and Dec on the right, but even this does not help everyone.

Background[link]

Anthony McPartlin was born on 18 November 1975 and Declan Donnelly was born on 25 September 1975. They met each other while working on the BBC children's drama Byker Grove in 1989. After a shaky start,^[2] they soon became best friends.^[2] They have achieved such popularity as a duo that they are hardly ever seen apart on screen. Indeed, it is reported that they are each insured against the other's death, although the amount is unknown.^[3] Their inseparability has led to them receiving joint nominations for many awards. They are both managed by the James Grant Group

Career[link]

Acting[link]

Although Ant had built some television experience with a brief stint on the children's television series Why Don't You?, which was broadcast on the BBC, Dec was the first of the two to acquire his place on the BBC children's drama Byker Grove. He joined in 1989, playing Duncan. A year later, Ant joined the cast playing PJ. Their friendship began when their storylines collided, creating a friendship off screen as well as on.^[4] Dec also played a stable boy in the adaptation of the novel The Cinder Path in his teenage years.^[5]

Music[link]

After leaving television, the duo turned their hand to pop music. Their first single was a song they performed while part of Byker Grove, entitled "Tonight I'm Free". The single had some success, and the duo went on to record two albums under their character names of PJ & Duncan. Later songs included "Why Me?", "If I Give You My Number", "Eternal Love" "Our Radio Rocks", "U Krazy Katz" and a cover of the The Monkees classic "Stepping Stone". Their most famous hit during this period was the BRIT Award nominated "Let's Get Ready To Rhumble", for which the video was choreographed by Mark Short, who had previously worked with Tina Turner and Peter Andre. For their third album, the duo reinvented themselves under their real names of Ant & Dec. The album featured their signature single "Shout". Their final single release was "Falling", which was the track that subsequently ended their musical career. The track was pulled from the British charts under the instruction of their record label, Telstar Records, after claims of copyright infringement were made, brought about by a pop duo, 'And all because...', who were also managed by Ant and Dec's management team. The duo claimed that Ant & Dec had stolen the song from them and released it without their consent. Subsequently, Telstar Records decided not to renew their existing contract, and they were dropped from the label. During their time, the pair released sixteen singles and three studio albums, however, none of their releases managed to reach number one, with their highest UK chart position being #3. The duo did, however, reach the top ten in Germany and Japan, and even had a number-one single in Germany, with their cover of the Everly Brothers' "All I Have to Do Is Dream". Success also struck in other European countries. The duo had a short lived revival in the music industry, releasing a song for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, entitled "We're On The Ball". The track peaked at #3,^[6] being beaten by Will Young and Gareth Gates.

Presenting[link]

Children's television[link]

Ant & Dec got their first presenting job in 1994, while they were still releasing music under the alias of PJ & Duncan. They co-presented a Saturday-morning children's show entitled Gimme 5, which was broadcast on CITV. The show only lasted two series before being dropped from the airwaves.^[7] In 1995, the duo were once again offered a job on CBBC, this time presenting their own series, entitled The Ant & Dec Show. The series was broadcast from 1995 to 1997, and in 1996, Ant & Dec won two BAFTA Awards, one for 'Best Children's Show' and one for 'Best Sketch Comedy Show'.^[8] In 1997, a VHS release, entitled The Ant & Dec Show – Confidential, was made available in shops, and featured an hour of the best bits from three years of the programme, as well as specially recorded sketches and music videos.^[9] In 1998, the duo switched to Channel 4, presenting a early-evening children's show entitled Ant & Dec Unzipped.^[10] This show also won a BAFTA, but was dropped from the airwaves after just one series.^[11] ITV soon signed the duo in August 1998,^[12] and within weeks, were assigned to present ITV1's Saturday morning programmes SMTV Live and CD:UK, alongside old friend Cat Deeley. The duo presented the shows alongside Deeley for three years, before making their permanent departure from children's television in 2001. Two VHS releases, compiling the best bits from both shows, were released in 2000 and 2001 respectively. The pair also starred in the children's TV series Engie Benjy during their time on SMTV.^[13][14]

Primetime[link]

Ant & Dec's first primetime presenting job came in the form of BBC Saturday-night game show Friends Like These, which was first broadcast in 1999. The duo presented four series of the programme between 1999 and 2001.^[15] In 2001, the duo's contract with ITV was renewed for a further three years, following their appearances on SMTV Live and CD:UK, and received their first primetime presenting job on the station, presenting brand new Saturday night reality series Pop Idol. The series was broadcast for two series only, and was replaced in 2004 by The X Factor, to which Kate Thornton was assigned presenting duties.

In 2005, as part of the ITV Network's 50th birthday celebrations, they were back on television fronting Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon, a celebration of some of ITV's most enduring gameshows from the past 50 years.

Ant & Dec also created and presented their own show, entitled Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. The show has so far ran for nine series, broadcast between 2002 and 2009. itv.com confirmed that the show is set to return in 2012 after being off air for three years. During the fourth series, Dec broke his arm, thumb and suffered a concussion whilst completing a challenge for the 'Ant vs. Dec' segment of the show. The incident involved learning how to ride a motorbike and jumping through a ring of fire. During the challenge, Dec failed to pull hard enough on the throttle of the bike, causing it to topple over and sending him flying through the air. The accident caused the pair to miss the Comic Relief charity telethon of 2005. In 2006, the first episode of series five saw the duo abseil down the side of the 22-storey high London Studios, where the show was filmed. Two DVDs, a best-bits book and a board game of the series were released during 2004.

In May 2002, Ant & Dec took the helm of a further reality series, entitled I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!. The series has been broadcasting on ITV1 since 2002, and ten series have been broadcast. The duo drew their highest viewing figures to date while presenting the series in February 2004, with nearly 15 million tuning in to watch the climax of the third series. In May 2006, the duo were assigned to present coverage of the charity football match Soccer Aid. The duo were then invited back to present coverage of the second match in September 2007, and have since presented coverage of each yearly match.^[16] In June 2006, the duo announced they had created a new game-show format for ITV1, entitled PokerFace. The show featured members of the public gambling high stakes of money in an attempt to win the ultimate prize. The first series began airing on 10 July 2006, and was aired for seven consecutive nights. The second series was broadcast in early 2007, and saw a move to a prime-time Saturday slot. Ratings for the series fell to below 3.5 million, and the series was subsequently axed in March 2007. A board game of the format was released in 2008.

In April 2007, the duo signed a two-year golden handcuffs deal with ITV, reportedly worth £40 million, securing the duo's career at the station until the end of 2009.^[17] In June 2007, the duo were offered the job of presenters on new ITV reality platform Britain's Got Talent by Simon Cowell. The series features contestants aiming to win £100,000 and spot on the bill at the Royal Variety Performance, while performing and being judged by Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan. The series was highly successful, drawing in nearly 12 million viewers. A second series was broadcast in May 2008, and drew in nearly 14.5 million viewers.^[18] The duo have since returned to present three further series of the show, and have also had a regular feature on the ITV2 spin-off show Britain's Got More Talent.

The pair filmed a series of six episodes for a new American game show, Wanna Bet?, in November 2007. The episodes was broadcast in 2008, but failed to attract enough interest for a second series to be commissioned.^[19] What You Wrote, another format created by the duo, was due to air in Autumn 2008 but was reportedly axed by ITV.^[20] In 2010, the duo debuted a replacement for their previous Saturday-night game show format, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, entitled Ant & Dec's Push the Button. The series was a success, and a second run of the programme was broadcast in 2011.

Ant & Dec have also presented the new game show Red or Black?, a creation of Cowell's, airing live on ITV1. On 24 December 2011, they presented ITV's charity initiative Text Santa with Holly Willoughby.

Other activities[link]

In 2006, a celebration to the show Spitting Image saw Ant and Dec having their own puppets made. They have also been made into cartoon characters on the comedy show 2DTV, and face masks in Avid Merrion's Bo Selecta. Wax works of the duo can also be seen in London's Madame Tussauds.

In April 2008, it was reported that Ant & Dec's production company, Gallowgate Productions, had purchased the rights to Byker Grove and SMTV Live, after the production companies that made them, Zenith Entertainment and Blaze Television, had both gone bankrupt in 2007. According to reports, the duo decided to purchase the rights to stop digital channels showing repeats of the programmes.^[21] On 28 September 2008, it was reported that the pair were attacked by the Taliban whilst in Afghanistan to present a Pride Of Britain Award.^[22] In December 2008, the duo starred in a seasonal advert, their first in seven years, for the supermarket chain Sainsbury's. The duo appeared alongside chef Jamie Oliver.^[23] In March 2009, the duo filmed a short film for inclusion on Comic Relief, which highlighted their story upon visiting a community centre for young carers in the North East. In September 2009, the duo released their official autobiography, entitled "Ooh! What a Lovely Pair. Our Story".^[24] In October 2010, the duo appeared in several Nintendo adverts playing both the Wii^[25] and Nintendo DS.^[26] In 2011, they both appeared on Celebrity Juice on ITV2.

Controversies[link]

In 1997, Welsh pop duo 'And all because...' successfully obtained legal aid and filed legal papers against Ant & Dec, along with their management team, record company and producers for copyright infringement over the song "Falling", and this was subsequently Ant & Dec's last single.

Law firm Olswang were commissioned to investigate the 2005 British Comedy Awards when the producers overturned the voting public's first choice, The Catherine Tate Show in favour of Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway for the People's Choice Award. The incident is also the subject of an investigation by media regulator Ofcom.^[27][28]

Following allegations of fraud in 2007, an investigation by auditors Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu discovered that two shows, Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon and Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, had defrauded viewers participating in phone-ins. The programmes were subject to a further investigation by Ofcom which found that between January 2003 and October 2006 Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway had:^[28][29]

• selected competition finalists before the telephone lines were announced as closed
• staggered the selection of competition finalists which meant that viewers entering the competition did not have a fair and equal chance of winning
• selected finalists on the basis of their suitability to be on television and where they lived
• selected an individual already known to the production team to be placed on the shortlist of potential winners and who went on to win the competition

and between September and October 2005, Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon had:

• on six occasions in the Prize Mountain competition, selected winners based on their suitability to be on screen
• failed to account for almost half of the competition entries

One episode of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! was also found to be in breach of Ofcom rules.

The pair were ridiculed for their alleged participation in the fraud on the front cover of the satirical magazine Private Eye.^[30]

On 10 September 2008, Ant & Dec announced that the frauds "will never happen again", insisting that a high-tech system and strict rules will ensure viewers cannot lose out with poorly monitored premium rate phone lines.^[31] On 30 September 2008, it was reported that Ant & Dec were being sued for $30 million by Greek American stand-up comedian and actor ANT for using his name in the United States. The lawsuit, among other things, alleges trademark infringement and fraud.^[32] The suit was dismissed in May of 2010.^[33] In October 2009, Kelly Brook claimed that Ant & Dec had been the cause of her removal as the fourth judge on Britain's Got Talent. She claimed that she was asked to leave the show after she upset the pair.^[34]

Acting[link]

They have, albeit infrequently, returned to acting. They played themselves in the film Love Actually^[35] (in which Bill Nighy's character referred to Dec as "Ant or Dec"). They have returned to their Geordie roots in a one-off tribute to The Likely Lads^[36] and also by returning to Byker Grove for Geoff's funeral.^[37][38]

In 1998, the pair starred in the pantomime Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs at Sunderland's Empire Theatre alongside Donnelly's partner at the time Clare Buckfield. The show was financially unsuccessful, making £20,000 less than it cost to stage, with the duo footing a large share of the shortfall.^[39]

Al Burton, creator of the American gameshow Win Ben Stein's Money, had approached Ant & Dec's talent agency with a proposal for a new reality television show entitled Ant & Dec Get Killed (after the film Penn & Teller Get Killed), in which the two scheme to murder one another, framed with a lighthearted soundtrack and canned laughter. Burton received negative public reaction and narrowly escaped being charged with several accounts of premeditated murder in British courts, and Ant & Dec refused the offer from the talent agency.^[40]

Ant & Dec's most recent acting appearance was in the film Alien Autopsy released in April 2006.^[41] The film gained mixed reviews about the storyline but the pair received generally good reviews for their acting abilities.

Awards[link]

In September 2006, they were voted by the general public as number 7 in a poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.^[42]

1994

• Brit Award Nomination – Best Song: "Let's Get Ready to Rhumble"^[43]

2006

• British Comedy Awards: Best Comedy Entertainment Personality^[44]
• British Comedy Awards: Best Comedy Entertainment Programme^[45]

2008

• TV Quick & TV Choice Awards: Best Entertainment Show (Saturday Night Takeaway)
• Nickelodeon UK Kids Choice Awards 2008: Favourite Funny Person, Best TV presenters and Best Family TV show (Britain's Got Talent)^[46]

2009

• TV Quick & TV Choice Awards: Best Entertainment Show (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)
• TV Quick & TV Choice Awards:Outstanding Contribution Award^[47]

2010

• British Academy Television Awards: Entertainment Performance (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!)

2012

• Freesat : Best TV Presenter(s)

National Television Awards[link]

• Ant & Dec have won the National Television Award for Best Entertainment Presenter(s) 11 years running 2001 to 2012.

2001

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter (SMTV Live)

2002

• National Television Awards:*Most Popular Entertainment Presenter (Pop Idol)
• National Television Awards: Special Recognition Award

2003

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment presenter (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)^[48]
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment program (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Reality Programme (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!)

2004

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment programme (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)

2005

• National Television Awards:* Most Popular Entertainment presenter (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)

2006

• National Television Awards:* Most Popular Quiz Programme (Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon)^[49]
• National Television Awards:* Most Popular Entertainment presenter (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)

2007

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment presenter (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment program (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Reality Programme (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!)

2008

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter^[50]

2010

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Programme (Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway)

2011

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Programme (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!)

2012

• National Television Awards: Most Popular Entertainment Presenter
• National Television Awards: Most Popular Reality Programme (I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!)

List of television appearances[link]

• Why Don't You? (1980s)
• Byker Grove (1989)
• Engie Benjy (2002)
• Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (2002)
• Celebrity Juice (2011)

As presenters[link]

• The Ant & Dec Show (1995–1997)
• Ant & Dec Unzipped (1998)
• SMTV Live (1998–2001)
• CD:UK (1998–2001)
• Friends Like These (1999–2001)
• Slap Bang with Ant & Dec (2001)
• Pop Idol (2001–2003)
• Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway (2002–2009, 2012/13)
• I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! (2002–present)
• Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon (2005)
• Soccer Aid (2006, 2008)
• PokerFace (2006–2007)
• Britain's Got Talent (2007–present)
• Ant & Dec's Christmas Show (26 December 2009)
• Ant & Dec's Push the Button (2010–2011)
• Red or Black? (2011–present)
• Text Santa (24 December 2011)

Film Credits[link]

• Love Actually (as themselves - 2003)
• Alien Autopsy (film) (Main Characters - 2006)

Television advertisements[link]

• Woolworths (Christmas 2001)
• McDonald's (voiceover only, 2002)
• Sainsbury's (Christmas 2008)
• Wii / Nintendo DS (2010/2011)

Television idents[link]

• ITV1 "Celebrities" idents (3 idents, 2002)
• ITV1 "Abstract celebrities" idents (5 idents, 2003)

References[link]