Everything About Supercomputers You Should Know

What is Supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a type of computer that performs at a higher level than a general-purpose computer. Instead of Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS), a supercomputer's performance is typically measured in Floating-Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS).

Supercomputers capable of around 10 17 FLOPS have been around since 2017. Supercomputers are typically utilized in scientific and engineering applications that deal with enormous databases and require a lot of computing. Powerful machines that could be referred described as desktop supercomputers or GPU supercomputers are now possible because of innovations like multicore processors and general-purpose graphics processing units.

Supercomputers have developed from the grid to cluster systems of massively parallel computing. Cluster system computing refers to the usage of several processors in a single system as opposed to an array of individual computers in a network.

These devices are enormous in size. A most powerful supercomputer might take up anything from a few feet to hundreds of feet. The cost of a supercomputer might range from 2 lakh to more than 100 million dollars.

They can accommodate over a hundred users at once. These computers can handle the enormous quantity of computations that are impossible for a human to do, i.e., calculations that are so complex that a human cannot solve them. These are the costliest computers ever created.
What Operating System Does Supercomputer Use?

Linux-Operating-System Because of modifications in supercomputer architecture, supercomputer operating systems have experienced significant alterations since the turn of the century.

Early operating systems were speed-enhancing custom-made for each supercomputer, but the trend has been away from proprietary operating systems and toward the adaption of generic software, like Linux. Today's top supercomputers all run Linux-based operating systems.
How do Supercomputers Work?

The central processor units of supercomputer architectures are numerous (CPUs). Compute nodes and memory are grouped together in these CPUs. Thousands of nodes can be found in supercomputers, which collaborate to solve problems by using parallel processing.

The most robust and powerful supercomputers are made up of several parallel computers. There are two methods for parallel processing: symmetric multiprocessing and enormous parallel processing. Sometimes, rather than housing all of the CPUs in one place, supercomputers are spread, i.e., they take power from a number of separate PCs located in various places.

Floating-point operations per second (FP/s), often known as petaflops or PFLOPS, are the unit of measurement for supercomputer processing performance.
What are the Applications of Supercomputers? or Applications of Supercomputers:

Supercomputers are used for a variety of computationally demanding tasks in many different fields, such as quantum mechanics, weather prediction, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (calculating the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations, among others (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). They are crucial to the discipline of cryptanalysis.
History of Supercomputers in India:

  • · According to the proverb "need is the mother of all inventions," India's pursuit of supercomputers began after an arms embargo placed on it following nuclear testing in the 1970s prevented it from importing Cray supercomputers from the United States.
  • Since supercomputers fell under the category of dual-use technology, they believed that India would use the same for military research as opposed to civilian ones.
  • In the 1980s, the ideation phase was initiated.
  • The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing created the first indigenous supercomputer, known as PARAM 8000, in 1991.
  • Russian assistance was crucial in the growth.
  • In 1991, with Russian assistance, PARAM 8000 was copied and installed at ICAD Moscow.
  • India is placed 63rd globally as of November 2020 when ranked by the number of supercomputer systems in the TOP500 list, with the PARAM Siddhi-AI serving as the nation's fastest supercomputer.
What Steps Has the Indian Government Taken to Develop an Indigenous Supercomputer?

  • The Indian government (GOI) committed to sanctioning $2.5 billion for research in the area of supercomputing in the 12th five-year plan.
  • The 7-year National Supercomputing Mission program was approved by the GOI in 2015.

National Supercomputing Mission: A "National Supercomputing Mission" (NSM) to install 73 domestic supercomputers across the nation by 2022 was launched in 2015 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. This program will cost $730 million over seven years. The NSM aspires to create the components domestically, as opposed to the past practice of assembling computers in India. C-DAC and the Indian Institute of Science are implementing the NSM. The goal is to link numerous academic and research institutions throughout India by developing a cluster of geographically dispersed high-performance computing facilities.

The "National Knowledge Network" (NKN) has been given to this. The mission entails setting up three petascale supercomputers and incorporates both capacity and capability machines.
Fastest Supercomputers of India:

Fastest-Indian-supercomputer There are three supercomputers based in India that are currently among the top 500 supercomputers as of June 2022. Here are the 3 fastest supercomputers in India right now -
 
  • India's fastest supercomputer,PARAM Siddhi-AI from theCentre for Development of Advanced Computing, is currently ranked 111 and has a Rpeak (peak performance) of 5267.1 TFlop/s and a Rmax (maximum performance) of 4619 TFlop/s.
  • Pratyush (Cray XC40) from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, is now India's second-fastest supercomputer with Rmax 3763.9 TFlop/s and Rpeak 4006.2 TFlop/s, and it is ranked 132 out of 500 of the world's fastest computers.
  • Mihir (Cray XC40) supercomputer used by the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, is now India's third-fastest supercomputer with a Rmax and Rpeak of 2570.4 TFlop/s and 2808.7 TFlop/s, respectively. It is ranked 249 among the top 500 supercomputers.
List of World's Fastest Supercomputers:

Here is the list of the World's Fastest Supercomputers in 2022 -
  1. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) constructed Frontier, the new top supercomputer, and it is located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, United States.
  2. The Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, has installed Fugaku, the previous leader of supercomputers0.
  3. The third-ranked supercomputer in the world is LUMI, another HPE device. In Finland, LUMI is crunching the numbers.
  4. In Tennessee, ORNL is home to Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer. Utilizing Summit, scientists can combat climate change, forecast severe weather, and comprehend how genetics affects opiate addiction.
  5. Sierra is another US supercomputer designed to test and maintain the dependability of nuclear weapons. It is a system that has been installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
  6. The Sunway TaihuLight is a Supercomputer created by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology and deployed in Wuxi, Jiangsu.
  7. Based on HPE technology, Perlmutter is yet another top 10 entry.
  8. A supercomputer named Selene is now operating at AI giant NVIDIA in the US.
  9. A supercomputer named Tianhe-2A was created by China's National University of Defense Technology and is now located at Guangzhou's National Supercomputer Center.
  10. The second-fastest supercomputer in Europe, Adastra from France, was created using HPE and AMD technologies.


Supercomputer?  Operating System  PARAM 8000  National Supercomputing Mission  What is Supercomputer   Supercomputer Operating System   How Supercomputers Work   Applications of Supercomputers   Indian Government Develop an Indigenous Supercomputer   Fastest Supercomputers in India   Worlds Fastest Supercomputers  


Comments

0 Comments

Leave a comment

Search