A Look At The World of Supercomputers - Copy

Advances in computing during the past half-century have given people a way to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems as desktop computers and mobile devices have provided access to a world of information right in their hands. And while these innovations are a phenomenon in their own right, they barely scratch the surface of the technology that is used to assist people all over the world.

Today’s supercomputers have become technological marvels that are nearly impossible to comprehend.

These modern models of supercomputers possess ultra-fast processing capabilities that make them tens of thousands times faster than a typical desktop computer. This unrivaled speed allows supercomputers to tackle tasks that are much larger and difficult to decipher.

Though they are built from the same components as regular models, supercomputers are integrated in order to work together.

Supercomputers were originally developed in the 1960s, but the real boom occurred 30 years later when Japan and the United States began making models with thousands of processors.

The performance of a supercomputer is measured by its floating-point operations per second (flops), and the fastest machines can achieve speeds in petaflops, which is in the quadrillions.

Presently, China’s Tianhe-2 is the world’s fastest supercomputer as it achieves 33.86 petaflops, according to TOP500, which ranks the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The prototypical supercomputer usually contains large datacenters filled with several machines that are physically connected. However, distributed computing is also considered a form of supercomputing. This consists of many individual computers connected by a network that devote some portion of their processing power to a large problem.

Cloud Supercomputing

The use of cloud data technology is also gaining prominence in the supercomputing world.

By tying together the processing power of multiple machines in separate locations to complete a complex task, cloud computing gives users the ability to perform multitude of tasks without relying on a single device.

Fleet tracking companies that are utilizing cloud computing deal with millions of daily data transactions that support the support the growth of the industry and have the ability to handle the large data spikes.