Many people are talking
about the super Computers. Did you hear about it? Today by this blog I
am gonna show you what is super Computer, it's working machanism, speed
measurements and uses. Well, What is a super Computer?
A supercomputer is a large computer or collection of computers that
act
as one large computer, capable of processing enormous amount of data.
It is one of the fastest and the most powerful type of mainframe
computer available at given time. A mainframe computer is a large
digital computer serving 100-400 users and occuring a huge room. The
primary use of supercomputers is in scientific computing which requires
high powered machines to perform complex calculation. Supercomputer can
process massive amount of data very quickly and also have enormous
amount of storage to facilitate many tasks at a time. They generate
large amount of fails. Hence, they palced in special air-conditioned
rooms. First introduced in the 1960s, the modern super Computers are
very expensive.
How do supercomputer works?
These computers works in two ways:
1)
A large number of discrete Computers ( like laptop ) distributed across
a network devote some or all of their time to solve a common
problem.Each individual Computer (client) receives the results to a
central server which integrates the task results from all the clients
into the overall solution.
2) A large number of
processors are placed in close proximity to each other. This saves
considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for the
processors to work together (rather than on seperate tasks).
What are the uses of the supercomputers?
Supercomputers
are normally used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as
weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling ( Computing
the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological
macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulation ( such as
simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of detonation of
nuclear weapons and research into nuclear fusion) and many more. Some
supercomputers have also been designed for very specific functions like
cracking codes and playing chess. Major universities, military agencies
and scientific research laboratories depend on and make use of
supercomputers very heavily.
How is the speed of a supercomputer measured?
The
modern supercomputers generally run on a Linux or Unix operating
system, as these operating system are extremely flexible, stable and
efficient. The Computing power of a supercomputer is measured in FLOPS
(Floating point operations per second). Floating point of operations
include any operations that involve fractional numbers. Such operations
take much longer to compute than integer operations. A megaFLOPS
(MFLOPS) is equal to one million floating point operations per second
and a gigaFLOPS (GDLOPS) is equal to one billion floating point
operations per second. A teraFLOPS (TFLOPS) is equal to one trillion
floating point operations per second. A petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) is equal to
one thousand teraFLOPS.
Prabesh Chudara
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