Supercomputers can also be systems composed of cluster computers. Not every component has to be present in the system. Supercomputers have pioneered newer methodologies in science, such as computational science, which combines experimentation and computation. Today's supercomputers have the capacity and power to perform hundreds of trillions of operations in a matter of seconds. For instance, one of the world's fastest supercomputers, with 136.6 trillion permanent operations per second, is in use at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States. The theoretical limit for this supercomputer is 183.5 trillion operations.
How Were Supercomputers Created?
Supercomputers were created in history in the 1960s by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation first. In the 1950s, a computer could not run more than one program simultaneously. Each user had the right to use the computer only once. Users had to use the program within their allotted time, using cards made of punched paper and a strip of tape. The program was loaded into the computer. It was then set to run until the program was terminated or crashed.
Today, supercomputers are mainly developed and built by traditional companies like Cray and IBM. Since June 2013, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China is the fastest supercomputer in the world. Tianhe-2 has 3 million 120 thousand cores. This supercomputer named Tianhe-2, which can perform 33.86 quadrillion operations per second, requires 17,808 kW of electrical power to reach this processing capacity. Turkey's first real supercomputer is located at Istanbul Technical University.
What Are the Uses of Supercomputers?
Supercomputers can be used in many different fields. Some of these areas are as follows:
- Large Scale Scientific Studies
- Nuclear Energy Research
- Motion Animations
- Calculation of Fluid Characteristics
- Meteorology Science
In these areas, supercomputers are used to perform the necessary calculations and operations. The most important difference between mainframes and supercomputers is that mainframes have a multi-user structure, while supercomputers are used for a single task based on processing power.
What Are the Features of Supercomputers?
Supercomputers have some common features. Some of these common features are as follows:
- Better Memory Capacity
- High Processor Speed
- Parallel Processing Capability
- Special Graphics Processors
- Special Operating Systems
- High Bandwidth
- High Energy Consumption
Better Memory Capacity
Supercomputers have very large memory capacities.
High Processor Speed
Supercomputers have very high processor speeds. Processor speed refers to the number of operations a computer can perform in one second.
Parallel Processing Capability
Supercomputers can perform multiple operations at the same time. Parallel processing allows a computer to perform more than one operation at a time.
Special Graphics Processors
Some supercomputers have special graphics processors for graphics processing. This is useful in applications that require high intensity graphics processing, such as scientific simulations and other applications.
Special Operating Systems
Supercomputers use specially designed operating systems. These operating systems are optimized to work in a way that best suits the characteristics of supercomputers.
High Bandwidth
Supercomputers can transfer data with high bandwidth.
High Energy Consumption
Supercomputers require high energy consumption. They contain a large number of high power-consuming components such as processors and memory.
What Are Software and Hardware Architectures of Supercomputers?
Some technologies have been developed to be used only in supercomputers. Some of these supercomputer specific technologies are as follows:
- Vector Processing
- Liquid Cooling Systems
- Nonuniform Memory Access
- Parallel File Systems
Which Operating Systems Are Used in Supercomputers?
The most preferred operating system for use on supercomputers is Linux. Until the mid-1980s, supercomputers generally put instruction set compatibility and password portability on the back burner to further improve performance. For a lot of hardware, supercomputers have hosted very different operating systems until this time. The Cray-1 supercomputer, for example, contained six different proprietary operating systems that were generally unknown. Similarly, different and less compatible vectorization and parallelization compilers were available even for the Fortran supercomputer. In this case, the adoption of computer systems would have continued with Cray's Unicos or the Linux-like ETA-10 if the first instruction set between Cray-1, Cray X-MP had not been compatible. But the Linux operating system is still the operating system of choice for supercomputers.
