Supercomputers

Supercomputers are one of the many types of modern computing machines which are capable of giving very speedy calculations. It is because of their high speed processing ability that Supercomputer systems are used in such works as animation graphics, weather forecasting, nuclear research work, petroleum research works, crypt analysis, molecular modeling and the likes. You must be wondering then what is the difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe computer system? While Mainframe machines are primarily used for a number of purposes, supercomputers are so designed to serve a singular purpose.A brief time line of the development of supercomputers has been given as follows:

• 1960s: Seymour Cray of Control Data Corporation (CDC) launches the Supercomputer systems.
• 1970s: Cray Research is founded by Seymour Cray after he leaves Control Data Corporation (CDC). Most supercomputers were meant for running vector processor.
• 1985-1990: Cray's model of supercomputer takes over the market.
• Today, supercomputers are designed by such companies as HP, IBM and of course, Cray Inc. Supercomputer systems are now becoming almost the same as laptop computers and desktop systems.

Before the 1970s, supercomputers were mostly run on scalar process principle. But in order to improve its efficiency a number of new technologies were developed such as:

1. Liquid Cooling
2. Striped Disks (RAID)
3. Parallel File systems
4. Non-uniform memory access (NUMA)
5. Vector Processing

When the hardwares of the supercomputers are prepared to serve a special mathematical operation, they are called Special Supercomputers. Currently there are many such types of supercomputers as the GRAPE for molecular dynamics and astrophysics, Deep Crack for cracking DES cipher, Deep Blue for playing chess, etc.