By Jerome Atkinson

 A supercomputer is a powerful computer that

possesses the capacity to store and process
far more information than is possible using a
conventional personal computer.
 Predominantly, the term refers to the fastest

“number crunchers,” that is, machines

designed to perform numerical calculations at
the highest speed that the latest electronic
device technology and the state of the art of
computer architecture allow.
 Supercomputers introduced in
the 1960s.
 Designed by Seymour Cray at

Control Data Corporation.

 Seymour Cray known as the

“father of supercomputers” then

founded his own company Cray
Research which built
supercomputers and took over
the supercomputing market
from 1980’s to the 1990’s.
.
 
 Supercomputers are single computer
systems, most are comprised of multiple high
                                                                       
performance computers working in parallel as
a single system.

The installed supercomputer has 65,536

processors and has sustained performance
of 280.6 trillion calculations per second.
 Supercomputer are used  Personal computer are
for highly calculation ask
such as problems used for checking
involving quantum email, writing a paper,
mechanical physics, surfing the internet
weather forecasting,
climate research, ect.
molecular modeling ect.  Portable, easy to move
 Complex detail
engineering.
 Specialize in certain
types of computation.
 Higher memory capacity.
 Supercomputers generates large amounts of
heat and must be cooled.
 Information cannot move faster that the

speed of light between two part’s of a

computer. This means that a supercomputer
that has many meters across must have
latencies between its components measured
in tens of nanoseconds.
 Processing Speeds Supercomputer
computational power is rated in FLOPS
(Floating Point Operations Per Second).
The first commercially available
supercomputers reached speeds of 10 to
100 million FLOPS.
 1teraflop = 1012 flops
 IBM's Blue Gene/L - 360 teraflops
 IBM's BGW - 115 teraflops
 IBM's ASC Purple - 93 teraflops
 Fastest supercomputers include IBM's Blue
Gene and ASCI Purple, SCC's Beowulf, and
Cray's SV2. These supercomputers are usually
designed to carry out specific tasks.  For
example, IBM's ASCI Purple is a $250 million
supercomputer built for the Department of
Energy (DOE). This computer, with a peak
speed of 467 teraflops, is used to simulate
aging and the operation of nuclear weapons.
 NY times reported in 1996 IBM exports 16
supercomputers to weapons labs in Russia
without license from US government.
 China has been accused of diverting some of

the supercomputers purchased from the

United States from civilian to military
applications.
 Do you think supercomputers will ever be
designed smaller?

 Should US companies be aloud to export

supercomputers to foreign militaries?