By Jerome Atkinson

A supercomputer is a powerful computer that possesses the capacity to store and process far more information than is possible using a conventional personal computer.

Predominantly, the term refers to the fastest “number crunchers,” that is, machines designed to perform numerical calculations at the highest speed that the latest electronic device technology and the state of the art of computer architecture allow.

Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s.

Designed by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation.

Seymour Cray known as the “father of supercomputers” then founded his own company Cray Research which built supercomputers and took over the supercomputing market from 1980’s to the 1990’s.

Supercomputers are single computer systems, most are comprised of multiple high performance computers working in parallel as a single system.

                                                                        

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The installed supercomputer has 65,536 processors and has sustained performance of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.

Supercomputer are used for highly calculation ask such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling ect.

Complex detail engineering.

Specialize in certain types of computation.

Higher memory capacity.

Personal computer are used for checking email, writing a paper, surfing the internet ect.

Portable, easy to move

Supercomputers generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled.

Information cannot move faster that the speed of light between two part’s of a computer. This means that a supercomputer that has many meters across must have latencies between its components measured in tens of nanoseconds.

Processing Speeds Supercomputer computational power is rated in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second). The first commercially available supercomputers reached speeds of 10 to 100 million FLOPS.

1teraflop = 1012 flops IBM's Blue Gene/L - 360 teraflops IBM's BGW - 115 teraflops IBM's ASC Purple - 93 teraflops

Fastest supercomputers include IBM's Blue Gene and ASCI Purple, SCC's Beowulf, and Cray's SV2. These supercomputers are usually designed to carry out specific tasks.  For example, IBM's ASCI Purple is a $250 million supercomputer built for the Department of Energy (DOE). This computer, with a peak speed of 467 teraflops, is used to simulate aging and the operation of nuclear weapons.

NY times reported in 1996 IBM exports 16 supercomputers to weapons labs in Russia without license from US government.

China has been accused of diverting some of the supercomputers purchased from the United States from civilian to military applications.

Do you think supercomputers will ever be designed smaller?

Should US companies be aloud to export supercomputers to foreign militaries?