Introduction
A supercomputer is a high-performance computer compared to a general-purpose computer. Supercomputer’s performance is measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS) rather than one million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers have been used for scientific and engineering applications that have to process very large databases, and for large amounts of calculations (or both). They are usually owned by a country or corporation and never used for personal use. In fact, the supercomputer can simply fill a large room.
History of Supercomputers in the World
Most of the computers in the market today are smarter and faster than the first supercomputer, and hopefully today’s supercomputer turns into a future computer by repeating the history of innovation. The first supercomputer was built in 1957 for the US Department of Defense by Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation (CDC) in 1957.
World’s top 3 Supercomputers
- Sunway TaihuLight – Developed in China with the computing power of a 93 petaflop/s.
- The Tianhe-2 – From China. This supercomputer is capable of 33.8 petaflop/s.
- Piz Daint – Developed in Switzerland and it is capable of 25.326 petaflop/s.
Supercomputers are mainly used for tasks that require huge computing power. Such a task takes a very long time if it is attempted on a normal computer.
Applications of a Supercomputer
- Weather and climate modeling
- Big data mining
- Academic research
- Medicine discovery
- Monsoon Forecasting
- Molecular dynamics
Conclusion
The number of supercomputers in the world is rapidly increasing. I am convinced that they are sometimes indicative of the technological progress of the country. In the future, we estimate that personal computers will run 10 times faster than today’s supercomputers.