15-03-2011, 02:46 PM
Prepared by
T Sandhya Rani
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Introduction
A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.
Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by “Seymour Cray” at ”Control Data Corporation” (CDC).
Since October 2010, the ”Tianhe-1A” supercomputer has been the fastest in the world; it is located in ”China”.
The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputers tend to become tomorrow's ordinary computers.
Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling etc
Supercomputer challenges, technologies
A supercomputer generates large amounts of heat and must be cooled.
A supercomputer consumes between 1-10 megawatt of electricity and converts all of it into heat.
The cost to power and cool the system is usually one of the factors that limit the scalability of the system.
Information cannot move faster than the speed of light between two parts of a supercomputer.
Supercomputers consume and produce massive amounts of data in a very short period of time. this information can be transferred quickly and stored/retrieved correctly.
Modern Supercomputer Architecture
A computer cluster is a collection of computers that are highly interconnected via a high-speed network or switching fabric. Each computer runs under a separate instance of an Operating System (OS).
A multiprocessing computer is a computer, operating under a single OS and using more than one CPU, wherein the application-level software is indifferent to the number of processors.
Measuring Supercomputer Speed
In general, the speed of a supercomputer is measured in "FLOPS" (FLoating Point Operations PerSecond).
"TFLOPS" (10^12 FLOPS, pronounced teraflops).
"PFLOPS" (10^15FLOPS, pronounced petaflops.).
Research And Development
IBM is developing the “cyclops64” architecture, intended to create a "supercomputer on a chip".
Other PFLOPS projects include one by ”Narendra Karmarkar” in India.
IBM is constructing a 20 PFLOPs supercomputer at ”Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory”, named “Sequoia”, which is scheduled to go online in 2011.
Conclusion
As the Technology has improved a lot we need to go with supercomputers to reach the standards of the developed countries.
Though the cost of introducing the supercomputers is expensive we have the need of these.