What is a Supercomputer?
Have you ever heard of supercomputers? Think of any movie that involves a hack. Where does the protagonist go? To a room with this kind of pillars, which look like giant computers, one after the other. This is what a supercomputer looks like, which, as you can imagine, is very different from the computer you have at home or in the office.
In this article we’ll let you know what they are and what they are used for.
The microprocessors that we find in our computers are the most powerful, today. There is not much way beyond. Therefore, supercomputers are not built of designed differently using exotic or unique elements. Instead, they have hundreds of processors (very similar to those in computers) that work in parallel and in combination. Supercomputers are high-performance computer processing equipment. They are extremely powerful and can perform tasks hundreds of times faster than a standard computer. In other words, they are just like our domestic computers but they use multiple processors instead of using only one.
The saying “unity is strength” is the best way to sum it up. Supercomputers get their speed and capacity from working simultaneously to complete multiple tasks using hundreds and thousands of processors, RAM memories and disks. The power of all these components, adds up and makes a great machine that can be assigned several repetitions of a task and get them done in a split of a second.
The main components which make them so powerfule are the computing processing speed and power, RAM and storage capacity, which a supercomputer has many of each.
These components, together to generate unique speed, which in this case are measured in flops (floating-point operations per second), on the other hand domestic computers’s speed is measured in gigahertz.
which are equivalent to floating-point operations per second. When we talk about teraflops or petaflops, we raise these operations to the fifth or tenth power.
The main fields taking that require the use of super computers are: education, science-research and military.
Some of the information delivered to us is generated by supercomputers as they are used to predict the weather, anticipate natural disasters, model molecular dynamics in Alzheimer’s disease, simulate the cosmos or the behavior of a nuclear explosion, and many more.
Main features of a Supercomputer
- Speed: Billions of floating-point operations per second. They are measured in teraflops.
- Users: It can be used by hundreds or thousands of users at the same time, in wide networks. However, it is only used by specialists of some fields such as science, education and military.
- Security: Supercomputers have high security measures. If the supercomputer is disconnected from the internet, it likely requires perimeter security as well. Within the system, some security features are disabled for access, since many users are performing tasks with them at the same time.
- Scalability: Due to their high price, cost of maintenance and life time, supercomputers’s software and hardware is upgradable to adapt without changing its configuration or size. Supercomputers RAM memory and storage is largely expandable as well.
- Social penetration: There are less than a thousand supercomputers worldwide. Social penetration is almost zero.
- Requirements: A supercomputer requires to be in a proper environment at the proper temperature at all times, a large space to be placed in and industrial air conditioning systems due to the high temperatures it reaches. It is not something you can craft at home.
- Costs: It is not only to the high value of the equipment itself. It also has a high cost of maintenance, energy consumption, cooling systems and the equipment responsible for keeping it in proper shape. To give you a perspective, Google's data centers consume 0.01% of the world's electrical energy. For its part, Facebook's server is valued at hundreds of millions of Euros.
- Impact: It is mainly used by large research centers. It provides high-speed calculations which helps speed up the results. Its impact in this field, is considered the highest.
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