2019

Assignment 1

DEPARTMENT OF
HEALTH SCIENCES (DPT)
SEMESTER I
REHAB ABID
Roll no M-17940
10/8/2019
Introduction
A supercomputer is a type of computer that has the architecture, resources and components to
achieve massive computing power. A large computer or collection of computers that act as one
large computer capable of processing enormous amounts of data. Supercomputers are used for
very complex jobs such as:
 Nuclear Research
 Collecting or calculating weather patterns
Supercomputers are the body builders of the computer world. They boast tens of thousands times
the computing power of a desktop and costs tens of millions of dollars. They fill enormous rooms,
which are chilled to prevent their thousands of microprocessor cores from overheating. And they
perform trillions, or even thousands of trillions, of calculations per second.

History of Supercomputers
 The CDC 6600 from Control Data Corp., is generally recognized as the first
supercomputer. Built in 1964, it was designed by Seymour Cray, and ran at about 1
megaflop (a million floating point operations per second). That was about three times faster
than the previous fastest computer, the IBM 7030 Stretch.
 The UNIVAC, which first appeared in 1951, was the first commercial computer produced
in the United States.
 Seymour Cray left CDC in 1972 to start his own company. The first Cray-1
supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1972.
In September 2008, Cray and Microsoft launched CX1, a $25,000 personal supercomputer aimed
markets such as aerospace, automotive, academic, financial services and life sciences.

World’s fastest Supercomputers

Summit, which occupies an area equivalent to two tennis courts is considered the world’s fastest
supercomputer with the performance of 148.6 petaFLOPS. Scientists are already putting the
world’s most powerful computer to work. A seven-member team from ORNL won the 2018
Gordon Bell Prize for their deployment of Summit to process genetic data in order to better
understand how individuals develop chronic pain and respond to opioids.
Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's PlayStation today is more
powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. -Erik Brynjolfsson
THE SUMMIT SUPERCOMPUTER

Distinguish Features of Supercomputers

 Unlike conventional computers, supercomputers have more than one CPU.
 An enormous storage capacity
 Very fast input and output capabilities
 They were used initially in applications related to national security, nuclear weapon design,
and cryptography. But nowadays they are also employed by the aerospace, automotive and
petroleum industries.
 They can operate on pairs of lists of numbers instead of pairs of numbers.

Uses of Supercomputers
 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 and molecular
modeling.
 Hollywood uses supercomputers for the creation of animation.
 Supercomputers are used for online gaming. Supercomputers help in stabilizing the game
performance when a lot of users are playing the game.

References
http://ecomputernotes.com/fundamental/introduction-to-computer/supercomputer
https://www.wired.com/story/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-breaks-ai-record/