World's Best Supercomputer

World’s Best Supercomputer

Supercomputers have been around for decades, though their definition has evolved at a much faster pace than that of the rest of the computer industry. While early supercomputers had less processing power than virtually any of the consumer grade high-end laptops for sale today, modern supercomputers have become processing behemoths. The supercomputers of today consist of thousands of machines that are fast in their own right, connecting them with an incredibly fast network in order to fully harness their power.

The result is a machine so fast that it can’t be realistically measured in gigahertz. Supercomputers do serve a functional purpose, though. Depending on who owns the computer, supercomputers are frequently used for things such as molecular modeling and simulations of nuclear explosions. Given their immense processing power, supercomputers are ideal for such large-scale simulations. What would take months or even years on a laptop takes just a few minutes on a supercomputer.

With so many resources required to construct a supercomputer, owning the fastest one is something that gives countries and companies bragging rights. Supercomputers that are new or upgraded are benchmarked to see where they rank. Currently, Japan has the world’s largest supercomputer.

Known simply as the K, Japan’s supercomputer features 548,352 cores. The machine is a joint venture of Fujitsu and a Japanese government body known as RIKEN. In terms of raw processing capabilities, it can perform 10 quadrillion calculations per second. This is a speed roughly equivalent to 10 petaflops. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the Japanese government also made a recent pledge of $1.3 billion to improve the K further.

The K doesn’t exist simply to wow the rest of the world, though. It’s being used to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Specifically, the Japanese government is using it to help better predict earthquakes and other natural disasters. Other purposes for the K include space exploration and drug development.

Although the K is currently the world’s leading supercomputer, that wasn’t always the case. Prior to the K’s claiming of the crown, China possessed the fastest supercomputer. The National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin featured a machine that consisted of more than 180,000 cores overall. Although it’s still an amazing machine, those 180,000 cores only produced about 2.5 petaflops of processing power. Like the K, its purpose centers on analyzing climate patterns and performing other large-scale simulations.

It will be decades before we see anything resembling the supercomputers of today in our homes. There are ways, though, to increase the computing power of your or your business’ machine. A machine in this category is referred to as a high performance computer or HPC for short. The Dell hpc relies on a series of nodes and proprietary software solutions. Although the HPC doesn’t rival the supercomputer, it does do an excellent job of increasing performance from a computer. Computers like the K shows just how much is possible when working with the most advanced computers of the modern era.

Read more at Technology Blog