Page 71 - Scientech 2014-15

SUPER

COMPUTER

ecently there has been news in media by ‘ TeraFLOPS’ or ‘PetaFLOPS’. ‘FLOPS’ is
Rthat India is planning to build a actually abbreviation of ‘floating point operation
Supercomputer by 2017 that will be 61 times per second’ which is a measure of computers
faster than the fastest of today. The fastest performance. One “PetaFLOPS” means one
Supercomputer of today is IBMs ‘Sequoia’ with thousand trillion FLOPS.
‘peak performance’ speed 16.32 PetaFLOPS
which is at ‘Lawrence Livermore National Seymour Roger Cray (28 September, 1925
Laboratory’, USA. If the goal is achieved India – 5 October, 1996) may be called the father
will be quite ahead of the time because it’s a of Supercomputer. ‘CDC 6600’, released
trend that the speed of supercomputer gets in 1964, is generally considered as the
doubled at an average of every 14 months first Supercomputer of the world. In the
and by that trend we can expect the speed of 1970s Cray setup is own company, ‘Cray
supercomputer at the end of 2017 to be around Computer Corporation’. The Supercomputers
500 PetaFLOPS. But the Indian machine will manufactured in this company are known as
be almost of ExaFLOPS speed. ‘Cray series Supercomputers’.

Now let’s have some talks about
Supercomputer and its Indian
version.

A super computer is a type of
computer that can perform a
huge number of mathematical
calculations with immense speed.
It is used mainly in scientific
researches (such as nuclear
research), weather forecasting etc.
The main difference between a
‘supercomputer’ and a ‘mainframe
computer’ is that a mainframe
computer uses its power to execute
many programs simultaneously
whereas a supercomputer uses
all its power to execute few
programs very fast. The speed of a
supercomputer is now measured

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