supercomputer conjure up the effigy of those massive , hulking , overheating machines that were the world ’s founding to computing – the ones that took up huge amounts of place to spit out computing after computation . You might be surprised to find out that even with the ubiquitous nature of the personalPCand internet organisation , supercomputers are still used in a mixture of mental process . In the next few pages , we ’ll give you the skinny on what supercomputers are and how they still serve in several industrial and scientific domain .
First , a small background . What makes a supercomputer so extraordinary ? Well , the definition is a act hard to pin down . basically , asupercomputeris any computer that ’s one of the most brawny , fast system in the existence at any yield period in clip . As technology come along , supercomputers must up the ante as well .
For instance , the first supercomputer was the aptly call Colossus , housed in Britain . It was designed to understand messages and crack the German code during the second World War , and it could study up to 5,000 characters a second . Sounds telling , right ? Not to derogate the Colossus ' hard work , but liken that to the NASA Columbia supercomputer that complete 42 and a half trillion procedure per moment . In other words , what used to be a supercomputer now could qualify as a satisfactorycalculator , and what we currently call supercomputers are as sophisticated as any computer can get .
There are , however , a few things that make a reckoner subdivision into " crack " territory . It will ordinarily have more than one central processing unit ( CPU ) , which allow the computing equipment to do faster electrical circuit switching and accomplish more tasks at once . ( Because of this , a supercomputer will also have an enormous amount of storage so that it can access many tasks at a time . ) It will also have the capability to do transmitter arithmetical , which means that it can calculate multiple lists of functioning instead of just one at a time .
Now that we have a lilliputian scope on supercomputers , get ’s check over out what a few of them do .
Meet the Supercomputers
As we say , supercomputers were originally developed for code cracking , as well as ballistics . They were designed to make an enormous amount of calculation at a time , which was a big betterment over , say , 20 math graduate student in a elbow room , hand - scratch operations .
In some ways , supercomputers are still used for those ends . In 2012 , the National Nuclear Security Administration and Purdue University began using a net of supercomputers to simulate atomic weapons capability . A walloping 100,000 political machine are used for the examination [ source : Appro ] .
But it ’s not just the military that ’s using supercomputer any longer . Whenever you delay the weather app on your phone , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA ) is using a supercomputer name the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System to foretell weather , predict weatherevents , and track quad and oceanic weather activity as well [ root : IBM ] .
As of September 2012 , the fastest computer in the world was IBM ’s Sequoia machine , which can run 16.32 petaflops a instant . That ’s 16,000 trillion operations , to you . It ’s used for nuclear arm surety and to make large - scale molecular dynamic calculations [ reservoir : Walt ] .
But supercomputers are n’t just sombre , intellectual machines . Some of them are used for merriment and games – literally . Consider World of Warcraft , the wildly democratic online secret plan . If a million the great unwashed are playing howler at a time , nontextual matter and speed are of utmost importance . move into the supercomputers , used to make the endless calculation that help the secret plan go orbicular .
Speaking of biz , we ca n’t blank out Deep Blue , the supercomputer that beat chess game champion Garry Kasparov in a six - game match in 1997 . And then there ’s Watson , the IBM supercomputer that splendidly beat Ken Jennings in an vivid game of Jeopardy . presently , Watson is being used by a wellness insurance company to augur patient diagnosing and treatment [ source : Feldman ] . A existent jack of all trade , that Watson .
So , yes : We ’re still profit from supercomputer . We ’re using them when we work war video games and in actual war . They ’re help us predict if we take to carry an umbrella to exploit or if we necessitate to undergo an cardiogram . And as the computing become faster , there ’s little end to the hypothesis of how we ’ll utilise supercomputer in the future .
As much as we imagine the technical gyration happen on personal computers , smartphones and tablets , the true statement is it ’s the supercomputer that will show us how far technology is going . The rapidly advancing processors that serve supercomputers are what slowly trickle down into the market – but not before impacting Brobdingnagian swath of our life , through military defense , weather condition , scientific discipline and wellness enquiry , and even gaming . One need only observe how fast one supercomputer ’s ascendency is displaced by another quicker , more muscular version to understand how much our life story depend on the shape up technology .
