Supercomputers: Everything You Need To Know

What is a supercomputer, exactly? A supercomputer is a high-performance computer system. Its performance is astounding compared to a general-purpose computer. Their performance is tracked in terms of FLOPS (floating-point operations per second), a method to measure high-speed computations.

•  A supercomputer’s speed and memory are two of its most critical features.
• The performance metric known as petaflops is widely used (1 followed by 15 zeros) – which refers to the number of computations it can perform in a second.
• A supercomputer contains around 250000 times the memory of the average computer we use every day.
• These are housed in large, clean spaces with strong airflow to cool them.
• They are used for solving problems that are too vast and sophisticated for standard computers.

The History of Supercomputers in the World

The current generation of supercomputers is far superior to the first generation of supercomputers in terms of performance. However, we need to look at the history of supercomputers to understand how far we have come along. 

• In 1957, Control Data Corporation constructed the first supercomputer CDC 6600 designed by Seymour Cray for the US military.
• In 1960, CDC built another supercomputer CDC 1604 which had transistors rather than vacuum tubes. 
• IBM’s Stretch was dethroned in 1964 by Cray’s CDC 6600, which could perform 3 million floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).

On the CDC 6600, the phrase “supercomputer” was invented to describe its capabilities. As the technology evolved and vector processing was changed into parallel processing, the number of processors in supercomputers expanded significantly during the past decade.

History of Supercomputer Use in India

To paraphrase a well-known saying, necessity is what started India’s road to supercomputers in the 1970s when the United States imposed an arms embargo on India following nuclear tests.

They reasoned that India might use supercomputers for both military and civilian reasons since they came under the category of dual-use technology.

• The ideation phase began in the 1980s.
•  The first indigenous supercomputer, known as PARAM 8000, was developed in 1991 by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
• In 1991, a replica of PARAM 8000 was created and placed at ICAD Moscow with Russian cooperation.
• In 2007, India was ranked in the top 10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

There were nine supercomputers in the country by July 2016, although none were ranked among the top ten.

How much more powerful are supercomputers than computers?

• It is customary to use MIPS as a unit of measurement to characterize the performance of everyday supercomputers  (million instructions per second).MIPS is a good starting point for basic programming commands (read, write and store).
• A computer’s processor speed is measured in gigahertz and expressed as the number of MIPS per core. In the world of science, supercomputers are assigned a higher grade because of the nature of the calculations they perform.
• These processors are measured in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second). Since their inception, the performance of supercomputers has been measured in of FLOPS:

Why Would You Need a Supercomputer?

They observe and simulate phenomena that are too huge, small, fast, or slow to be studied in the laboratory. Astronomers, for example, can go back and forth in time to explore the universe using supercomputers. Another important field is quantum mechanics. Weather and climate forecasts can be improved by using multi-factor and interrelationship models. This is particiulay helpful in predicting the onset of monsoon. Another use case is in the discovery of new medicines. A protein’s ability to fold data could lead to discovering new drugs.

Other Uses

• The digital India mission may be reinforced and better mobilized with the help of extensive data mining.
• Thus, India’s electricity supply is safe and stable as a result. 
• Exploration of oil and gas.
• Better safety rules and better communication on board planes and spacecraft will be made possible by a better understanding of airflow in these machines.
• Nuclear reactors ‘ fission and fusion processes can be studied to improve nuclear infrastructure models and increase the nation’s energy security.

Supercomputer simulations allow scientists to dock molecules and study their interactions, potentially leading to the development of advanced materials for future technology. Because of an early warning from a supercomputer, astronomers had plenty of time to watch and record the 1994 comet-Jupiter collision.

Conclusion

It was revealed earlier this year that the 12th five-year plan would allocate $2.5 billion to supercomputing development. With a $730 million investment in 2015, the Government of India (GOI) approved the National Supercomputing Mission. This seven-year supercomputing program aims to construct a cluster of 73 supercomputers connecting academic and research institutions across India.