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Supercomputer The most Powerful Computer in the World

Posted by Abhyudaya Tripathi On July - 18 - 2009

Super computer

A supercomputer is a computer which performs at a higher rate of speed than other computers. Computer programmers believed that today’s supercomputer will become tomorrow’s computer.

Supercomputer was found in 1929 by the New York World, referring to tabulators manufactured by IBM. These tabulators would probably appear slow, cumbersome and awkward to use but they represented the cutting edge of technology. This continues to be true of supercomputers today, which harness immense processing power so that they are incredibly powerful, sophisticated and fast.

In the 1960s, Supercomputers were designed first by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and then led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form Cray Research, his own company.

He then enjoyed over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding his position at the top in supercomputing for five years (1985–1990). A large number of smaller competitors entered the market in the 1980s, in parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market, but most of these disappeared in the mid-1990s supercomputer market crash.

For supercomputers, the primary use is in scientific computing that requires high-powered computers for complex calculations. Scientific organizations such as NASA boast supercomputers the size of rooms for performing rendering complex formulas, calculations and performing other tasks that require a formidable amount of computer power. Some supercomputers have also been designed for very specific functions like playing chess and cracking codes. A famous chess-playing supercomputer is Deep Blue.

Other features of supercomputers are:

A supercomputer is custom-assembled and cooling
Utilizing elements from a range of computer manufacturers
Most supercomputers run on a Linux or Unix OS, as these operating systems are stable
extremely flexible and efficient
Have multiple processors
Run smoothly
Requiring complex cooling systems to ensure that no part of the computer fails

This computer is a state-of-the-art and an extremely powerful computer that can manipulate a large amount of data in a short time. Supercomputers are very expensive and are used for engineering applications and specialized scientific that do a great amount of computation, among them animated graphics, meteorology, fluid dynamic calculations, weapon simulation, nuclear energy research and petroleum exploration or must handle a big databases.

The two approaches to the design of supercomputers are:

Massively parallel processing (MPP) is there to chain together thousands of microprocessors utilizing parallel processing techniques.
A variant of this, called a cluster computing that employs large numbers of personal computers interconnected by a local area network and running programs written for parallel processing.