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What is supercomputer? How does it work? – Detailed Explanation

In this article we will discuss about What is supercomputer? and How does it work ? in detailed explanation. Read this article and comment if you like.

Half a century back, even the smallest computer would have taken up an entire room. And today, thanks to the microchip, more powerful computers than ever have been put in the pocket. But have you ever thought, if a house-sized computer is made with these small chips, how powerful it will be? Is it possible to create a supercomputer like this?

Let’s know all the details about supercomputing.

what is supercomputer
Photo from >> www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/the-end-of-the-supercomputer-era/

What is a supercomputer?

A computer is called a super-computer because of which super features? In simple words, computers that can solve complex scientific problems very fast, can predict the weather or can tell now what the climate will be like in 2050 and the computers that can do such amazing things are called supercomputers. Now you may ask exactly how fast the computer works. If I add more RAM and more core processors, more GPUs to my computer, can I do supercomputing? You need to be aware of some terms first to understand this fully. A supercomputer doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be a giant computer or millions of times faster than your average computer. In fact it uses a completely different method to complete a task. Like your normal desktop or laptop, it multitasks rather than doing just one thing at a time. And this is basically the main feature that makes a computer a supercomputer.

Serial and Parallel Processing

A normal computer can perform only one task at a time, i.e. to complete a task; it completes one process at a time and provides the output of the task. And this is called serial processing. Now you might say, “Hey I play music, browse the internet and render video at the same time with my computer, and you say one thing at a time”? In fact, your computer can complete hundreds of millions of commands per second, making it seem like real time to you, even when doing one task serially. Let’s try to make the matter more clear with a nice example. Imagine an ordinary shopkeeper, suppose you go to his shop and ask him to give you a 1 kg packet of flour. Now what will he do—he will first get up from his seat, then go to the flour packet rack, bring the flour packet, hand it to you, and count your cash and put it in the drawer. Now see, it doesn’t matter how fast he got up from his seat or how fast he got the dough from the rack and handed it to you. The point is that he is doing only one thing at a time. No matter how fast he is serving you, he is only doing one job at a time and serving you by doing one job at a time. This is how normal computers complete their work. But today’s modern supercomputers work using a completely different method. It divides a job into different parts and processes them simultaneously, and this system of doing work is called parallel processing. As per the above example, now imagine that you go to a store to buy 1 kg of flour, 1 liter of oil, and 1 kg of sugar. Now suppose there are 3 people together in that shop to help the shopkeeper. Then everyone can choose a different job to deliver the things you want to you. Someone will bring sugar, someone will bring oil and someone will deliver flour and in this same time you can complete the money transaction with the shopkeeper. Notice again, each brings different things at the same time, but all come to you together. Thus, no matter how many things you want to buy in the shop, if there are many people working there, it is possible to complete all the work very quickly in the same time. And this is parallel processing; theoretically, our brain also works in parallel processes.

Why is parallel processing necessary in supercomputing? or How does it work?

The computers we use every day for work do not need to be so efficient. Browsing the Internet, sending email, or typing requires very little of your computer’s processing power. But if you want to do more complex tasks, such as changing the color of a very high resolution digital photo, your computer will need to do a lot of processing, sometimes taking up to several minutes to complete. If you want to do gaming on your computer in addition to just browsing the Internet, sending emails, or typing, you will need a fast processor, dedicated GPU, and more memory (RAM), or your system will work slowly. Faster processorElection Banner Design in Nepali -Social Media Banner Designs and double the memory will make your computer run dramatically faster. But how fast? This speed also has a limit—because a processor can only do one task at a time. Now imagine you are a scientist and you work in a meteorological office. Together you will work on weather forecasting, new cancer drug tests, and climate modeling up to 2050. Now you can upgrade your PC’s processor and more memory to complete these tasks, although it will work faster than before but still there is a limit to its working. But if your tasks are divided into one piece and each piece is handled by a separate processor, that means parallel processing, then your tasks will be done much faster and efficiently than before.

What software does the super computer run on?

A computer is a machine that can do all the common tasks (virtually of course). If you want, you can run the supercomputer using your computer’s operating system, such as Windows! But most supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems.

How powerful are supercomputers?

Common computers express their performance in terms of MIPS or Million Instructions per Second. This indicates how many commands (read, write, data store) the system can process to complete a task. MIPS makes it easy to compare two processors, the more MIPS the processor can handle, the more powerful it is. This is commonly known as the processor speed, which is usually expressed in gigahertz. But the performance of supercomputers is expressed differently. Since these computers are used in scientific work, its capacity is calculated as FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second). It is an efficient way to calculate the working capacity of a computer

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