Essay on Supercomputers

Document Type:Essay

Subject Area:Technology

Document 1

As of 2016, the record superfast computer in the world was in China in Sunway TaihuLight in the city of Wixu. The first commercially available supercomputer was designed by Seymour Cray and released into the market in 1964, and was referred to as Control Data Corporation 6600 (CDC). The CDC in its working could handle three million floating point operations per seconds, what is referred to as flops, and its cost was around $8 million. In 1972, Cray went ahead and founded a company under his name to assemble the supercomputers, and even though the company has changed hands in terms of ownership a number of times, it’s still in operations. In 2008 together with Microsoft, Cray founded a CX1 personal supercomputer trading at $25, 000 aimed for use in the areas such as academic, financial services, aerospace, life sciences and automotive (Hoffman, et-al, 2011).

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But if you try to execute a higher range of functions, like creating and editing a very large digital photographic image, or playing games, it will require a huge processing memory (RAM) or the computer will hang and slow down. This is solved by having an extra processor or doubling the memory and the computer will pick quite fast. Assuming one is a scientist doing some research on cancer drug or dealing with a research involving complex calculations, it will require a superfast processor. This is what lead to the scientists figuring out the idea of parallel processing and decided to combine two or more processors in a single computer and enhance its speed. That is how supercomputers were born and combine a few processors, and since the 90s, supercomputers had routinely encompassed thousands of processors to form massive serial processing and making the computers appealing to the researchers, scientists and other institutions executing complex tasks.

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In actual sense, about half of the energy consumed by the supercomputers goes into cooling the system. But since innovation has been at the core of supercomputers, future developers, and ecological importance needs to be attached on the high-performance supercomputers. Engineers in future will need to integrate energy efficiency and green solutions in their various supercomputer projects and ensure efficient usage of energy and power by the supercomputers. The Artificial Brain There is high probability that in the next 20 years or so, computers will be able to execute their functions in a similar manner to the human brain. In 1996, a scientist in Syracuse University gave an estimate that our brains have a memory capacity being somewhere between one and three and the computers can match this working capacity in future if developed further.

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