Supercomputers | Topic of the day (2024)

FAQs

What is a supercomputer question answer? ›

Supercomputers are general-purpose computers that function at the highest operational rate or peak performance for computers. Processing power is the main difference between supercomputers and general-purpose computer systems. A supercomputer can perform 100 PFLOPS.

“Supercomputers run hot. Keeping Frontier from melting down requires infrastructure that sprawls over 7,300 square feet,” the article said. “Powered by enormous pumps, about 6,000 gallons of water per minute flow through the system and across the computer's more than 9,000 nodes.

Cheyenne supercomputer sold at auction for $480,000 - DCD.

What is a supercomputer used for? Supercomputers are commonly used for making predictions with advanced modeling and simulations. This can be applied to climate research, weather forecasting, genomic sequencing, space exploration, aviation engineering and more.

The fastest supercomputer in the world is a machine known as Frontier, but even this speedster with nearly 50,000 processors has its limits. On a sunny Monday in April, its power consumption is spiking as it tries to keep up with the amount of work requested by scientific groups around the world.

Size-wise, an average Human Brain is 1.3 liters in volume, while supercomputers are in the tenths of million liters. Finally, the top 100 most powerful supercomputers have a combined processing power of about 8 Exaflops, equivalent to about eight Human Brains. There's another 8 billion Brains in the world!

Did you know Google's new quantum computer is about 158 million times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer? Google's quantum computer, known as Sycamore, achieved a significant milestone in 2019 by performing a complex computation in just 200 seconds.

The most powerful supercomputer in the world now exceeds 1 exaFLOP — 1 quintillion (1018) FLOPS — while normal PCs and laptops usually have power of several hundred gigaFLOPS — 1 trillion (109) FLOPS. We refer to machines like this as exascale supercomputers.

Yes, of course you can. There is no law I know of that limits the amount of computing hardware you may purchase. But to compete with nation-state-sized supercomputing, you will need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars.

How many super computers are there in the US? ›

As of 2024, United States has the most supercomputers on the list, with 171 machines. The United States has the highest aggregate computational power at 3,652 Petaflops Rmax with Japan second (621 Pflop/s) and China third (292 Pflop/s).

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

A microwave oven is not a computer by itself, though it has a computer built-in to aid its task of microwaving. This is called an embedded computer, and the functionality is hard-coded to make it cheaper to build.

Babbage is sometimes referred to as "father of computing." The International Charles Babbage Society (later the Charles Babbage Institute) took his name to honor his intellectual contributions and their relation to modern computers.

Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) is a measure of a computer's performance based on the number of floating-point arithmetic calculations that the processor can perform within a second.

supercomputer, any of a class of extremely powerful computers. The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems available at any given time. Such computers have been used primarily for scientific and engineering work requiring exceedingly high-speed computations.

IBM Deep Blue is an example of supercomputer.

Some popular examples of special-purpose supercomputers involve Belle, Deep Blue, and Hydra, Gravity Pipe, MDGRAPE-3, etc. In recent times, JAGUAR (located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) has ranked '1' in the TOP500 list of these computers.

Unlike traditional computers, supercomputers use more than one central processing unit (CPU). These CPUs are grouped into compute nodes, comprising a processor or a group of processors—symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)—and a memory block. At scale, a supercomputer can contain tens of thousands of nodes.