What is a Supercomputer?
A supercomputer is similar to a personal or notebook computer, but far more powerful. For example, TACC’s largest supercomputer, Ranger, has a peak performance of about 579 trillion operations per second, which is about 10 to 100,000 times more powerful than a laptop computer. Ranger also rapidly reads and writes data to hard disks, holding several thousand times more data than a notebook computer. The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin has several supercomputers, which are used by researchers in Texas and around the world. See our list of systems here. People working in many kinds of careers and industry use advanced computing systems to solve problems that impact our lives everyday, including scientists, artists, engineers, and medical and health professionals, among many others. Supercomputers are used in many industries, including manufacturing, transportation, petroleum, weather forecasting, and emergency response services…to name just a few!
A supercomputer is a computer which performs at a rate of speed which is far above that of other computers. Given the constantly changing world of computing, it should come as no surprise to learn that most supercomputers bear their superlative titles for a few years, at best. Computer programmers are fond of saying that today’s supercomputer will become tomorrow’s computer; the computer you are reading this article on is probably more powerful than most historic supercomputers, for example. The term “supercomputer” was coined in 1929 by the New York World, referring to tabulators manufactured by IBM. To modern computer users, these tabulators would probably appear awkward, slow, and cumbersome to use, but at the time, they represented the cutting edge of technology. This continues to be true of supercomputers today, which harness immense processing power so that they are incredibly fast, sophisticated, and powerful. The primary use for supercomputers is in scientific computing, which
A supercomputer is a mainframe computer that is among the largest, fastest or most powerful of the computers available. Today’s supercomputers operate on the order of tens of teraflops (that’s computer lingo for trillions of operations per second!). And supercomputers are being improved all the time! Soon they will operate on the petaflop-scale (that’s one quadrillion operations per second!). Supercomputers are used to tackle problems that are very complex or problems that would be messy to deal with in the real physical world because they are dangerous, deal with incredibly small things are incredibly big ones! Here’s some examples: • Scientists could use a supercomputer to simulate how a tsunami would impact a coastline or a given city. • A supercomputer could be used to simulate a supernova explosion in space. • Supercomputers are used to test the aerodynamics of the latest military planes. • Supercomputers are being used to model how proteins fold and how that folding might affect
