Essay on the topic:

«Supercomputers and their role in the life of humanity»

Completed by a student of
The Nizhny Novgorod State University
Of Architecture and Civil Engineering
The IS-27 group
2 year

2020г

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 Table of contents.
Introduction………………………………………………………………………...3
Chapter 1. What is a supercomputer.........................................................................3
Chapter 2. The most powerful super-computer in our time………………………..4
Chapter 3. Areas of application of supercomputers………………………………..4
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….5
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..6

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 Introduction
Developers had a problem during the appearance of the first computers. The
performance of a computing system was very low. The computer industry is
growing at a tremendous speed and processor performance is growing rapidly.
Constantly appearing more and more new and sophisticated software, increasing
the growth of new users and expanding the scope of use of computer systems. This
increases the power requirements of the equipment used, which led to the
emergence of supercomputers.
The purpose of this essay is to determine the role of supercomputers in human
life.
Chapter 1. What is a supercomputer?
A supercomputer is a high-performance computing machine, significantly
superior to most computer models in its parameters. They are a significant number
of samples of parallel-running computers connected by a local network. Such
devices can handle huge amounts of data.
Also, note the main features that characterize a supercomputer:
 The most advanced technological level;
 Specific architectural solutions aimed at improving performance;
 The price usually exceeds 1-2 million dollars.
Consider the basic elements that make up a supercomputer:

One of the main elements of a supercomputer is a task scheduler. Its main

functions are distribution of system capacities for various tasks, monitoring of their
implementation and the load of individual nodes.
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 An equally important component is a special information storage system. Usually
it consists of two parts: one is for calculations, the other is for storing data.
Cooling and uninterruptible power systems provide uninterrupted operation of
the supercomputer.
Supercomputer performance is measuring in FLOPS, the number of floating
point operations the system can perform per second. For example, the Cray-1
supercomputer, created in 1975, could perform 133 million operations per second;
its maximum power was 133 MFLOPS. Moreover, Summit OK-Ridge, the most
powerful supercomputer, has a capacity of 122.3 PFLOPS (122.3 quadrillion
operations per second).
Chapter 2. The most powerful super-computer in our time.
Now, the most powerful supercomputer is still Summit, the supercomputer of the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The complex covers an area of about 520 m2 and consists of 4608 IBM Power
Systems AC922 server nodes; in total, the supercomputer is equipped with 9216
22-core IBM POWER9 processors and 27 648 NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics
processors.
15 150 liters of purified water circulate in the cooling system, the power
consumption of the system as a whole is 15 MW, which is compared with the
consumption of 8100 average residential buildings.
Chapter 3. Areas of application of supercomputers.

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 Powerful computers are using in areas that require processing large amounts of
data. Initially, supercomputers were used only in the military sphere: the creation
of nuclear weapons, reactor designs. However, over time, supercomputers
increasingly began to use other types of tasks, for example,
 Statistics;
 Physics, including the study of the atomic nucleus, the processing of
information obtained at accelerators;
 Analysis of exploration data to find minerals such as oil and gas;
 The study of processes occurring in the earth's crust, the prediction of
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions;
 Chemistry and medicine. Modeling reactions, searching for new drugs and
their side effects.
This list is far from complete. Scientists around the world are increasingly
resorting to the use of supercomputers. Many scientific trials are impossible to
carry out; they can be dangerous or very expensive and large-scale.
The use of supercomputers has made a huge leap in many scientific studies.
Thanks to the use of this technology, scientists is coming closer to modeling
systems at the atomic level.
Previously, supercomputers were available mainly to scientists from nuclear
centers. However, the development of technology has allowed mastering the
industrial production of these machines, and the number of their users currently
reaches tens of thousands. In the modern world, supercomputers are an integral
part of life; they are using not only by the aerospace, military, electronic industries,
but also by the most important areas of scientific knowledge.
Conclusion.
The rapid development of supercomputers has become necessary due to the need
of humanity for machines that simulate processes in real time and the
implementation of several other complex tasks. Supercomputers are the
embodiment of the latest achievements of science and technology, they set the
pace and development trends of other types of machines. Now, the increase in
productivity of supercomputers is responsible for increasing the complexity of the
tasks facing humanity. However, you can see that now, humanity is not engage in a
qualitative improvement of supercomputers, but in a quantitative. This suggests
that the current stage of development has already entered the stage of relative
stability and that no qualitative changes should be expect in the near future. For
example, consider Summit, it commissioned in 2018 and is still a powerful
supercomputer. But the level of "stability", which will last for some time, will be
followed by a level at which the capabilities of supercomputers can no longer keep
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pace with the needs of mankind. This need will create the need for the transition of
supercomputers to a new qualitative level.
In the modern world, supercomputer technologies have become a strategic area,
without which the further development of the economy is impossible. The power
of national supercomputers is now as important as the power of power plants or the
number of warheads.
Supercomputer has become an indicator of the technical level of the state.
Based on this, we can conclude that now the number and quality of
supercomputers meets the needs of humanity. However, in the near future,
humanity may need technologies that are more powerful. In this regard, we can say
that even at the moment, humanity must intensively develop this industry. This
will help in the development of the most important scientific branches, such as
physics, chemistry, history, medicine and many others.
Bibliography:
https://studentlib.com/chitat/referat-249947-superkompyutery_i_ih_primenenie.html

https://militaryarms.ru/novye-texnologii/superkompyuter/

https://www.osp.ru/os/1995/06/178750/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(%D1%81%D1%83%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%BE
%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%8C%D1%8E%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80)