What is a Supercomputer?
Some scientific problems and processes are so complex that you need SUPERCOMPUTING power to tackle them! Just what is a supercomputer?
A supercomputer is a computer that is among the largest, fastest or most powerful of the computers available. As of this writing (late 210) the fastest supercomputers operate on the order of more than 200 teraflops (that s computer lingo for trillions of operations per second!). And supercomputers are being improved all the time! Soon they will operate on the petaflop-scale (that s one quadrillion operations per second!).
Supercomputers are used to tackle problems that are very complex or problems that would be messy to deal with in the real physical world because they are dangerous, deal with incredibly small things are incredibly big ones! Here s some examples:
- Climate researchers model Earth s current andpredicted future climate using supercomputers.
- Astronomers and space scientists use supercomputers to study the Sun and space weather.
- Scientists use supercomputers to simulate how a tsunami would impact a coastline or a given city.
- Supercomputers are used to simulate supernova explosions in space.
- Supercomputers are used to test the aerodynamics of the latest military planes.
- Supercomputers are being used to model how proteins fold and how that folding might affect people that have Alzheimer s Disease, Cystic Fibrosis and many kinds of cancer.
- Supercomputers are used to model nuclear explosions, limiting the need for real nuclear testing.
Current fastest supercomputer system
Tianhe-1A is ranked on the TOP500 list as the fastest supercomputer. It consists of 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs with a new interconnect fabric of Chinese origin, reportedly twice the speed of InfiniBand.[7] Tianhe-1A spans 103 cabinets, weighs 155 tons, and consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity.
Tianhe-I
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 : is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax (maximum range) of 2.566 petaFLOPS; that is, over 2½ quadrillion (thousand million million) floating point operations per second, or FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, it is the fastest supercomputer in the world and one of the few Petascale supercomputers in the world.
In October 2010, an upgraded version of the machine (Tianhe-1A) overtook ORNL s Jaguar to become the world s fastest supercomputer, with a peak computing rate of 2.507 petaFLOPS.