Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the forefront of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (including drug discovery and design), astrophysics and nuclear engineering.

The first supercomputer was created in the early 1960s. At that time, an IBM 7090 mainframe was used for processing space science data at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This machine had a memory of around 1 megabyte (1 million bytes) and could perform about 500 thousand instructions per second. However, it was not until the early 1970s that the term “supercomputer” came into common use. The CRAY-1, developed by Seymour Cray of Cray Research Inc., is considered to be the first true supercomputer. It was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 and had a peak performance of around 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 MFLOPS). In contrast, today’s personal computers can typically perform between 10 and 100 GFLOPS (10^9 or one billion floating-point operations per second).

The fastest supercomputers are constantly changing as technology improves. As of June 2019, the TOP500 list of fastest supercomputers is led by Summit, an IBM system installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee with a LINPACK benchmark performance of 148 petaflops (148×10^15 FLOPS). However, it is expected that exascale systems—capable of performing one exaflop or 10^18 FLOPS—will be operational within the next few years. In addition to raw processing power, modern supercomputers often incorporate features such as fault tolerance and massively parallel processing to increase their usefulness for certain tasks.

Supercomputers are very expensive; Summit cost approximately $200 million USD to build while its predecessor,. Sunway TaihuLight cost $293 million USD . They also require significant amounts of electricity to operate; for example, Pangea III consumes nearly 25 MW (megawatts) when running at full capacity.. Consequently, they are usually only found in well-funded organizations such as national laboratories and large corporations involved in cutting-edge scientific or technological research.