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Supercomputer

Supercomputers are extremely powerful computers used primarily for scientific and engineering tasks requiring high-speed computations, measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Since 2017, the fastest supercomputers have been running Linux-based operating systems, with ongoing research to develop exascale supercomputers. The US has historically led in supercomputer technology, with notable advancements from Japan and China, and as of June 2020, the fastest supercomputer is Fugaku in Japan.

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6 views2 pages

Supercomputer

Supercomputers are extremely powerful computers used primarily for scientific and engineering tasks requiring high-speed computations, measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Since 2017, the fastest supercomputers have been running Linux-based operating systems, with ongoing research to develop exascale supercomputers. The US has historically led in supercomputer technology, with notable advancements from Japan and China, and as of June 2020, the fastest supercomputer is Fugaku in Japan.

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 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.

supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose


computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per
second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers
which can perform over 10 17 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).

For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS to tens of
teraFLOPS.[4][5]

Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.
[6] Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and
China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.[7]

Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide
range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather
forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and
properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical
simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft
aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). They have been essential in the
field of cryptanalysis.[8]

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades the fastest were made by
Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his
name or monogram. The first such machines were highly tuned conventional designs that ran more
quickly than their more general-purpose contemporaries. Through the decade, increasing amounts of
parallelism were added, with one to four processors being typical. In the 1970s, vector processors
operating on large arrays of data came to dominate. A notable example is the highly successful Cray-1 of
1976. Vector computers remained the dominant design into the 1990s. From then until today, massively
parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors became the norm.[9][10]

The US has long been the leader in the supercomputer field, first through Cray's almost uninterrupted
dominance of the field, and later through a variety of technology companies. Japan made major strides
in the field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in the field. As of June 2020,
the fastest supercomputer on the TOP500 supercomputer list is Fugaku, in Japan, with a LINPACK
benchmark score of 415 PFLOPS, followed by Summit, by around 266.7 PFLOPS.[11] The US has four of
the top 10; China and Italy have two each, Switzerland has one.[11] In June 2018, all combined
supercomputers on the TOP500 list broke the 1 exaFLOPS mark.[12]

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