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Dreaming of a supercomputer?

By Jean-Claude Elias - Jun 23,2016 - Last updated at Jun 24,2016

www.computerworld.com

Do you need a supercomputer at home? Can you really use one? Does your daily computing require a machine able to perform trillions of operations per second?

The glitz around powerful computers is as old as the technology itself. In the movies (2001: A Space Odyssey), at college or in real life, the fascination remains. The big change is that the word powerful has little to do today with what it represented 30 or 40 years ago. It is not in the actually meaning but in the scale of the numbers. It is mind blowing, it is flabbergasting.

Suffice it to read what Jack Dongarra (BBC News) recently wrote about China’s latest super machine: “The 93 petaflop Sunway TaihuLight is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi. […] At its peak, the computer can perform around 93,000 trillion calculations per second”.

Who needs this and why?

Today’s computer market is well segmented and serves, essentially, four categories; at least as far as pure computer processing power is concerned. These are first the typical home and the small office users. This is and by far the largest community. Its needs are simple: Internet browsing, e-mailing, photo editing, managing small databases, perhaps doing straightforward PowerPoint presentations, writing and eventually performing easy calculations. By current industry standards any desktop or laptop computer and most tablets can do the job perfectly well. Long gone are the days when one had to worry about not enough memory, disk space or processing power.

The second category is that of those called “power users”. Whereas these are still home and small office users, they process high definition photos and videos, play advanced computer games and manipulate high digital files, sometime as large as 1GB per file. Although more demanding than the first, this category can still be happy with desktop and laptop machines, but just requires more memory and fast, dedicated graphic cards added. Still, even with 16GB memory and some NVidia 4GB graphic card, and that may end up being rather expensive, we’re still far from supercomputers.

The third category is represented by mid-size to large enterprises, whether private or public, civil or military. They need what is commonly referred to as servers. Whereas these still are not supercomputers, they are much more powerful than desktops and laptops not only because they have more technical resources and can handle thousands of tasks simultaneously, but also because they run under special operating systems (Windows Server OS, Linux) that provide the high level of control and security that enterprises need.

Then come supercomputers. For the tasks they are built for, nothing can be too fast or too powerful. This encompasses, for example, advanced scientific research, processing gigantic amounts of data for weather forecast, calculating path for military missiles, sending space crafts to Mars, mathematical models that simulate “big things” like the birth of the universe, etc. Definitely not home not office tasks! The machines are essentially found at prestigious universities, scientific or space research facilities and at the military centres of some countries.

 

If you are dreaming of having such a computer at home and feel the frustration of not seeing your dream come true, take heart. Just think that your humble laptop, the one that cost you less than JD1,000 and that you carry around everywhere, is as powerful as the supercomputer that could be found circa 1990 at Berkeley University. So in way you do own a supercomputer after all.

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