We've come a long way, baby. Today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's common computer. As you read this article, remember that due to the rapid growth of computer speeds and server capabilities, there could be a better, faster and stronger supercomputer than the ones mentioned in this article. That's how fast computer technology works. Supercomputing technology is a symbol of national economic competitiveness among countries like the US, Japan, China and the European Nation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960's and have grown exponentially since.
A supercomputer can be defined as a high performance machine designed to have extremely fast processing
speeds and are used for highly intensive calculative tasks such as weather forecasting and simulating, quantum physics, molecular modeling, nuclear weapon simulations, climate research and many grand challenge problems. The New York Times has an impressive analogy, ‘To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner (the fastest computer in 2008) can in one day'.
In 2005, the world's fastest computer was IBM's Blue Gene with a top speed of 360 trillion operations per second. The goal was to get to one petaflop which is a measure of computer processing speed that is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. A Floating point is a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.
Today, the top three fastest computers in the world include the Cray XT "Jaguar" Supercomputer which is housed at The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is the fastest with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops; The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops and is the second fastest. The once legendary IBMRoadrunner takes number three in terms of the world's fastest computers with a processing speed of 1.04 petaflops/s.
Extraordinary advances in computer science, technology and server capabilities can only improve our world and make it a better place to live…One petaflop at a time; then one exaflop, one zettaflop, yottaflop and one xeraflop.
A supercomputer can be defined as a high performance machine designed to have extremely fast processing
speeds and are used for highly intensive calculative tasks such as weather forecasting and simulating, quantum physics, molecular modeling, nuclear weapon simulations, climate research and many grand challenge problems. The New York Times has an impressive analogy, ‘To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner (the fastest computer in 2008) can in one day'.
In 2005, the world's fastest computer was IBM's Blue Gene with a top speed of 360 trillion operations per second. The goal was to get to one petaflop which is a measure of computer processing speed that is a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. A Floating point is a method of encoding real numbers within the limits of finite precision available on computers.
Today, the top three fastest computers in the world include the Cray XT "Jaguar" Supercomputer which is housed at The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is the fastest with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops; The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops and is the second fastest. The once legendary IBMRoadrunner takes number three in terms of the world's fastest computers with a processing speed of 1.04 petaflops/s.
Extraordinary advances in computer science, technology and server capabilities can only improve our world and make it a better place to live…One petaflop at a time; then one exaflop, one zettaflop, yottaflop and one xeraflop.
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