Supercomputers - what are they and which are the most powerful?
22 July 2021
Computers are an indispensable element. At work, at home or on your own phone; we live in a digital era and that is undeniable. Hence, the importance of this invention, a priori, recent in time.
However, the term "computer" already appeared in the 17th century, although its purpose was different: to designate a person capable of performing calculations. Later, in the 20th century, machines such as Zuse's Z1 (the first programmable computer), Turing's famous "Enigma", used during the Second World War, or the first portable computer in the 1970s, were seen.
The 1990s also witnessed a historic milestone: the IBM Deep Blue won a chess match against the then world champion Garry Kasparov.
And at the same time, in 1993, the famous Top500 list The world's supercomputers, where international researchers determine the capacity of the machine by looking at certain parameters.
Power, performance or speed are some of the variables to be taken into account when naming supercomputers.
A supercomputer or supercomputer is a type of computer with well above-average computing capabilities. In fact, the speed of these machines is measured in petaflops or a thousand trillion operations per second.
In other words: these computers are designed to process billions of pieces of data in one second.. Hence, through statistics, they can be used to predict a tsunami or search for planets, among other actions.
First and foremost, it should be noted that although the world's most powerful PC has a Japanese origin (the Fugaku); most supercomputers are split between China and the United States.
On the one hand, China is home to 226 of the 500 most powerful supercomputers, and on the other hand, the United States is ahead in terms of petaflops. It has 644, as opposed to China's 565.
Then, the top 10 supercomputers in 2021
This is without a doubt the world's most powerful computer. This Japanese design, originating from the Japan Computer Science Centre in KobeThe Summit, which has topped the list since 2020, beat the American Summit with 415 petaflops, has been at the top of the list since 2020.
Although its speed is 442 petaflopsThis machine can exceed 1,000 petaflops (or 1 exaflop). This happens when Fugaku performs simple predictive floating point operations (artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms). At present, its more than 7 million cores are being used for in COVID-19 related research.
Its processor measures 7 nanometres and uses an ARM architecture, which is characterised by smaller microprocessors, but also lower power consumption. This results in lower costs and is therefore much more optimised.
At the same time, it also uses the following operating system as its operating system Linuxas well as McKernel for its lightweight core. This infrastructure is called the Heterogeneous Core Interface.
Fugaku is the world's fastest supercomputer; in fact, the Japanese spent almost 7 years developing it.
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