What is Supercomputer?

 

A supercomputer is nothing but a big computer. Like our desktop or laptop computers, it has memory, processor, hard drive etc. but large in number. It consists of many processor and that's why it has high computational capacity.  Supercomputer is capable of processing enormous amount of data and it has high processing speed.

The history of super computer dates back to 1960. Seymour Cray, an American electrical engineer,  made the initiative to build a fastest computer at  Control Data Corporation (CDC) and in 1964, 'CDC 6600' was made. It was the flagship computer of supercomputer series by CDC.

Supercomputers are typically measured in FLOP (floating-point operations per second) instead of  MIPS(million instructions per second). Now a days, supercomputer performed at  some gigaflops or even in teraflops.

Basically the preferred supercomputer architecture today is called Parallel Computing, which means that we divide our problem up among a number of processors. Applications that use parallel processing are able to solve computational problems by simultaneously using multiple processors.

Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for specialized scientific and engineering applications where it handles very large databases or do a great amount of computation. It is generally used in Quantum mechanics, Climate Research, Molecular Modeling, Simulation etc.