Running head: SUPERCOMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

Supercomputer Technology, its Use and Status

Mohammad Ajmal
Ivy Tech Community College
Research Paper (758)
Dec 12, 2015

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Abstract
Supercomputers are the most powerful, advance, and fastest invention of computer scientists yet.
The first supercomputer came and changed the world by its tremendous speed and capability of
handling operation thousand times more than an ordinary personal computer. These computer are
widely used by big IT companies and also for defense system. Supercomputers are getting much
smaller and more efficient, fast, advanced than they were ever before. . Supercomputers conjure
up the image of those massive, hulking, overheating machines that were the world's introduction
to computing the ones that took up huge amounts of space to spit out computation after
computation.

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Supercomputer Technology, its Use and Status

As we are getting towards technology, computers are getting smarter, sophisticated, and
faster. Computers were never smarter than ever before. If we look at the very first ever
programmable computer built in 1936 called Z1 was only able to calculate mechanically with the
help of punched tape, but now just personal computers can do pretty much all task like
calculation, gaming, programming, and can work thousand times faster and more efficiently.
Todays personal computers are so advanced, but there is another big think called
supercomputers. Supercomputers conjure up the image of those massive, hulking, overheating
machines that were the world's introduction to computing -- the ones that took up huge amounts
of space to spit out computation after computation. Seymour Cray called the father of
supercomputers. He built the first supercomputer in 1957 but was not declared as a
supercomputer. The first official and successful supercomputer was built in 1965 named Cray
(CDC 6600). The dimension of super computer was more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly
8 by 3 by 100 feet (2.4 m 0.9 m 30 m), took up 1800 square feet (167 m2), and consumed
150 kW of power. Before the Cray built in 1965, there were several computer came out but they
were called mainframe computers. After the cray supercomputer (CDC 6600) was built several
companies got into race to make better and faster supercomputer. These companies were IBM,
Aspen System, Silicon Graphics, and Intel.
We live in the computer age so it's no surprise that a nation's international importance is
often measured on the number and the size of supercomputers it runs. Supercomputer are used
for many purposes including Mapping the blood stream, Testing nuclear weapons, Forecasting

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hurricanes, Predicting climate change, and for defense system. For years, scientists have
achieved higher and higher speeds simply by building machines with thousands and thousands of
central processing units, or CPUs, in them, and then breaking the calculations they want to
perform into smaller pieces that could be parceled out to all of those CPUs, but the drawback
with this approach it that all those chips required enormous amounts of electricity. Now scientists
are using GPU chips instead of CPU chip because they consume very little energy to perform but
they dont work as efficient as CPU.
Tianhe-2 the world fastest supercomputer is at National University of
Defense Technology in Guangzhou with a Linpack benchmark performance of
33.86 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating-point calculations per second. It is
ranked as #1 three times in a row for being the fastest supercomputer in the
world, but the United States is catching up. Recently, the United States
working on to build fastest supercomputer in the world which would be 20
times faster than Tianhe-2 and it is expected to be delivered by 2025.
In conclusion, I would say that supercomputers has remarkably
changed the world in technology. They are faster and stronger enough to do
any task these days. They are used for a wide variety on computational
science that can be impossible for a human brain to do. There will be more
powerful, fast, and efficient supercomputers in next ten years. More and
more countries are trying to get in the race to build the fastest
supercomputer and because of this competitive environment they will
definitely make some of the high performance, technological advance, and
super-fast supercomputers.

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Reference
Anthony, S. (2012, April 10). The history of supercomputers. Retrieved
December 10, 2015. From: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/125271the-history-of-supercomputers
Wong, W. (2012, June 18). Supercomputer. Retrieved December 12, 2015.
From: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-06-18/business/chi-argonnesmira-rated-as-no-3-supercomputer-20120618_1_computational-sciencequadrillion-calculations-supercomputer
Kiger, Patrick J. (2012, October 17). What is the worlds fastest
supercomputer used for? Retrieved Dec 12, 2015. Retrieved Dec 12, 2015.
From http://computer.howstuffworks.com/worlds-fastest-supercomputer.htm
Urquidi, J. (2014, September 2). Nvidia GPUs Power Cray's Latest
Supercomputer Cluster. Retrieved December 11, 2015, from
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/nvidia-cray-gpu-supercomputer-cluster,12156.html

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