Whats the worlds fastest supercomputer used for?
The world’s fastest supercomputer will probably never be known as the world’s fastest supercomputer. RIKEN’s MDGrape-3 is the first machine to break the petaflop barrier — that’s 1 quadrillion calculations (floating-point operations, to be specific) per second — and it’s three times faster than the currently ranked fastest computer in the world, IBM’s BlueGene/L. But MDGrape-3 is so specialized that it can’t run the software used to officially rank computing speed. What it can do is determine the effect of any chemical compound on one of the most intricate systems in the human body in a couple of seconds. MDGrape-3 is designed for pharmaceutical research, specifically molecular dynamics simulation. In developing drugs, pharmaceutical companies have to analyze thousands on thousands of chemical compounds to find out how they’ll affect the protein-bonding structures in the human body. Protein struc
