Essay On Supercomputer

Supercomputers.

Introduction.

In our current generation of computer technology, a computer not only has played a big role in our daily lives and have tremendously evolved throughout the years. In this essay I’ll be discussing about supercomputers which will be breakdown into different discussion points e.g. its brief history and what are the uses that has helped us human beings grow and some future trends that will arise as time comes.

Firstly, I’ll like to briefly explain what a supercomputer is. Basically a supercomputer is a extremely powerful computer which consists a huge amount of processors, ram, CPU and GPU and are specialize for applications that requires an enormous amount of calculations and processing as quickly as possible hence

The Cray 2 circuits was pack together on logic boards which were crammed tightly together and houses a similar chassis to its predecessors. Having its peak performance at 1.9flops, it twice the amount the X-MP which made it retain the title of world’s fastest supercomputer up till 1990.

Fast forward a few years, many other countries have also tried building better supercomputers. E.g. NEC SX-3, Fujitsu Numerical Wind Tunnel and Hitachi SR2201 uses similar architectures to the Cray and was able to become the fastest supercomputers in the world then. The ASCI Red, created in 1996 after a failed project by Intel was the first ever supercomputer CPU to be made off the shelf. It has also reached a peak of 3.1flops and was able to be crowned the fastest supercomputer for 4 years. Years after the ASCI was overtook by the NEC Earth Simulator created by the Japanese in 2002 peaking at 35 teraflops and in 2004, IBM first released a series of supercomputers known as Blue Gene/L which swept the competition until 2008. With its capabilities of 70 teraflops, the Blue Gene/L has 16,000 compute nodes with 2 CPUs each. In its final iteration in 2007 it had more than 100,000 compute nodes and peak its performance of 600