What is Supercomputer Definition, Examples

What is Supercomputer, its types, uses, advantages

Friends, do you want to know what is a supercomputer? All these things will be introduced

Friends, I welcome you Sumit to HE Blog, friends today we are going to talk about supercomputers. Today we will know what is called a supercomputer, its uses and how many types of supercomputers are there? So guys let’s start.

Topics

• What is Supercomputer – (What is Supercomputer)
• Uses of Supercomputer
• history of supercomputers
• Types of Supercomputer
• General-purpose Supercomputers
• special purpose computers
• Advantages of Supercomputer – (Advantages of Supercomputer)
• Disadvantages of Supercomputer

What is Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer with a higher level of performance than a normal computer. Supercomputer performance is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of Million instructions per second (MIPS)

Supercomputers have thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations per second. Some supercomputers can perform up to 100 quadrillion FLOPS. Since information moves rapidly between processors in supercomputers, it is ideal for real-time applications.

Use of Supercomputer

In the 1970s supercomputers were mainly used for weather forecasting and aerodynamic research. Over the next decade they were used for probabilistic analysis and radiation shielding modeling.

The 1990s was when supercomputers were used for Brute force code breaking. Then they started being used in 3D nuclear test simulation.

In the last decade (starting in 2010) supercomputers have been used for molecular dynamics simulations. Supercomputers are also being used today in climate modeling (weather forecasting) and life science research.

In addition, supercomputers are being used by governments. The advanced simulation and computing program run by the US federal agency National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) currently relies on supercomputers. in order to manage and simulate the United States nuclear stockpile.

History of supercomputers

The US, China, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan are already in a race to build faster, more powerful and technologically better supercomputers.

America’s first major advances in supercomputing can be seen in 1964. When the CDC 6600 was manufactured by Control Data Corporation (CDC)

Designed by American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect Seymour Cray. It is generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer because it performed up to three megaFLOPS.

In this Cray was used instead of germanium transistor. Silicon transistors could run faster. In addition, he solved the problem of overheating by incorporating refrigeration into the supercomputer design. CDC 6600 was followed by CDC 7600

In 1976, four years after leaving CDC, Cray came up with the 80 MHz Cray-1, which became one of the most successful supercomputers of all time, performing at an impressive 160 MFLOPS

This was followed by Cray-2 in 1985, which performed at 1.9 gigaFLOPS and at that time was the second fastest supercomputer in the world after Moscow’s M-13.

Types of Supercomputer

In general, supercomputers are divided into two categories –

General-purpose Supercomputers
Special Purpose Supercomputers

General-purpose Supercomputers

These types of supercomputers are also mainly divided into the following three parts –

Vector Processing Supercomputers
Tightly Connected Cluster Computers
Commodity Computers

Vector processing

Vector Processing Supercomputers are those which depend on Vector or Array processors. These processors are basically like a CPU that can perform mathematical operations on a large number of date elements at a high speed.

Tightly Connected Cluster Computers

Cluster computers are groups of connected computers that work together as a unit.

Commodity Computers

Commodity cluster is basically a large number of Commodity Computers. that are connected to a high-bandwidth, low-latency local area network

Special purpose computers

Special purpose computers include such supercomputers. Which are made with a clear objective of achieving a particular task/goal. They generally use Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). which in turn provide better performance

Advantages of Supercomputer

There are many advantages of supercomputers which are as follows –

Cost Effective

Companies using supercomputers save a lot of time in managing tasks. It not only gives good results but it also reduces the cost in the long run. Also, there is no need for organizations to purchase expensive physical models by using supercomputers.

Security

A supercomputer provides better security by decrypting the password. Even passwords used in other devices can be decrypted by supercomputers. In addition to decrypting, a supercomputer can easily guess passwords.

Speed

The time taken by the supercomputer to process the tasks is very less. They usually take very little time to solve the calculations.

Compared to a normal computer, this rate is about 100-1000 times lower. Meaning, a task that takes many hours to complete. can be finished in a fraction of a second by a supercomputer

Complex Tasks

Complex tasks such as rendering animations can be easily done with the help of supercomputers. With fast rendering, it gives a good result overall.

Environment friendly

A supercomputer is environmentally friendly to some extent by providing a virtualized testing environment for scientific and medical research. Real-time testing such as nuclear weapons testing is known to cause many threats to the environment.

Disadvantages of Supercomputer

Along with the advantages, there are also many disadvantages of supercomputers which are as follows –

Size

Supercomputers are also very large in size. Therefore, they require a lot of space. A supercomputer usually takes up an area of ​​more than 1000 square feet.

Maintenance

Supercomputer monitoring requires the appointment of a specialist staff. For this purpose, a special software is used. Which is able to detect the failures and the overall usage of the computer

Storage

To achieve the full potential of a supercomputer, it requires a large amount of storage space. Whatever data is being produced will be accommodated by the storage drive. So it should have enough space to store all the data. Without sufficient storage space, the supercomputer cannot calculate.

Heat Release

A supercomputer is equipped with a large number of processors. Which can generate a large amount of heat during its operation. Due to this heat, most of the equipment is easily damaged

Power Consumption

Supercomputers generally consume large amounts of power. A supercomputer requires an average of about 4 megawatts (MW) of power. This amount is about 5000 times more than that of a normal house. All this can lead to an increase in the cost of electricity.

In short

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