What is a Super Computer?

A computer having a very high computing speed several thousand times faster than that of conventional ones is called as super computer.

The term supercomputing was first used by New York world newspaper in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators that IBM had made for Columbia University. Supur Computers introduced in the 1960s, were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation and led the market into 1970s. Today, computers are typically designed and produced by traditional companies such as Cray, IBM, and HP etc.

The term super computer itself is fluid because; today’s super computer tends to become tomorrow’s ordinary computer. The examples of some super computers are Road runner built by IBM and Param Padam developed by C-DAC of India.

These super computers are being utilized in some specialized areas such as defence aircraft, design, and weather research. Some other areas such as molecular biophysics, quantum chemistry and reaction dynamics etc. are using high speed numeral computing. They are also being used in biological macromolecules, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, research into nuclear fusion etc.

However, Indian attempts are aimed at developing super computers based on fronted technology but they are attempted to speeding up computers using slower processors. Scientists at the advanced Numerical Research and Analysis Group (ANURAG) of the Defence Research and Development organization have developed the high-speed, user friendly PACE (Processor for Aerodynamic Computation and Evaluations) system.

This DRDO’s PACE project was primarily intended for fluid dynamics studies which required high computational speeds. Later on PACE plus super computer developed by the DRDO which was launched in 1995-96. After PACE super computers, scientists at the center for Development of Advanced Computing developed the new model of PARAM super computer, capable of making 1,00,000 million calculations per second.

This found wide application in long range weather forecasting, seismic data processing, remote sensing data, launch vehicle stimulation and drug design. Recently, C-DAC has developed PARAM PADMA, next generation high performance computer with a peak computing power of one Teraflop. This initiative of C-DAC is aimed at designing, developing and deploying advanced computing systems, tools and technologies that impact strategically important application areas.

For the first time in the latest ranking of the top 500 supercomputers, India has made it as the home to one of the most powerful systems. The computational Research laboratory (CRI) has developed super computer EKA which has been installed at the CRL in Pune. This has sustained speed of 117.9 teraflops. This computer system have a direct affect on lives on people, especially in areas such as earthquake and Tsunami modeling economic modeling and potential for drug design.