Supercomputers
About Us
This website will give you all things you need to know about supercomputers. We will give you what you need to know about supercomputers including the different features, the history of them, and how they are performing right now in the marketplace
Background
Most people around the world at one point or another have owned a computer, but most people are not as fortunate encough to own a supercomputer. A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general computer. The performance of a supercomputer is measured in FLOPS, which stands for, floating-point operations per second.
In 2017, the supercomputers on that were on the list of the 500 fastest computers were run on the Linux operating system. Now in many countries are now doing extra research to build even faster, more powerful, and more technologically superior supercomputers. Supercomputers play a big role within the field of computational science, and are used for a wide array of tasks in this field. These other fields include quantum mechanics, weather forcasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, and many other fields.
History
Supercomputers came around back in the 1960s, with the Atlas at the
University of Manchester, the IBM 730 Stretch and a series of computers at the Control Data Corporation, which was designed by Seymour Cray. The Atlas was a joint venture between Ferranti and the Manchester University and was designed to operate at processing speeds approaching one microsecond per instruction, which
is about one million instructions per second. The first Atlas was employed on
December 7,1962 as one of the world’s first supercomputers. At the time this was considered to be most powerful computer in th world. In 1972 Cray left the CDC in order to form his own company named Cray Research. Four years later, Cray
delivered the 80 MHz Cray 1, and it became one of the most sucessful
supercomputers in history. It used intergrated circuits and increased word size to obtain performance of 136 megaflop, which was a lot faster than the 3 megaflops CDC 6600. In 1985, the Cray-2 was released which had an 8 processor liquid cooled computer and Fluorinert was pumped through it as it was
operating. It performed at 1.9 gigaFLOPS and was the world’s second fastest
after the M-13 supercomputer in Moscow.
Uses
A supercomputer has one essential feature of a computer is that it’s a generalpurpose machine you can use in all kinds of different ways: you can send emails on a computer, play games, edit photos, or do any number of other things simply by running a different program. If you’re using a high-end cellphone, such as an Android phone or an iPhone or an iPod Touch, what you have is a powerful little pocket computer that can run programms by loading different “apps”, which are simply computer programs by another name. Super Computers are slightly different.
Some supercomputers are engineered to do very specific jobs. Two of the most famous supercomputers of recent times were engineered this way. IBM’s Deep Blue machine from 1997 was built specifically to play chess against Russian grand
master Gary Kasparov. Its later Watson machine named for IBM’s founder Thomas
Watson, and his son, was engineered to play the game of Jeporady. Specially designed machines like this can be optimized for particular problems. For exmaple Deep Blue would have been designd to search through huge databases of potential chess moves and evaluate which move was best in a particular situation, while Watson was opttimized to analyze tricky general-knowledge questions phrased in (natural) human language.
Business Analytics
During the course of a year there is a list made by the TOP500 publishes twice a year the list of supercomputers. This list ranks the most powerful machines in the world. Some of the names on the list include the Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2. Both of these are Chinese computers, and the Tianhe-2 is considered the fastest supercomputer in the world. Some of the top five supercomputers come from China, Switzerland, Japan, and the United States.
Sources
- Supercomputers
- These are the world’s most powerful supercomputers
- IBM to deliver 200-petaflop supercomputer by early 2018; Cray moves to Intel Xeon Phi
- FLOPS
- Supercomputers
- The History of Supercomputers
- Semantic Markup
- HP’s New Supercomputers is Up to 8,000 Times Faster Than Existing PCs