What is Supercomputing?

Supercomputing usually refers to compute intensively software applications performed on the world’s fasted computers. Typical supercomputing applications include scientific programs such as simulations of the earth’s climate for weather forecasting, molecular dynamics for drug design, and aero dynamics for car and aircraft design. Today’s fastest supercomputer operates at a speed of about 35 teraflops, that is 35 trillion floating point operations per second (a floating point operation is a mathematical operation, such as multiplication or division, on two high precision numbers). 35 trillion (35,000,000,000,000) operations per second sounds like a lot (it actually blows your mind), but you may be surprised that your new desktop computer from Walmart is only about 1000 times slower. That is, if you get 1000 of them to work together efficiently, you have a supercomputer. And that is exactly what many research institutions have done: putting together clusters of Linux based computers running on high performance Intel processors to obtain an affordable supercomputer. Some of the latest developments are discussed here.