10 Awesome Reasons To Love Supercomputers

From their sheer scale to the multitude of things they can do, there are many reasons to love supercomputers. Here are just ten of them!

AsianScientist (Jan. 3, 2017) – The ongoing quest by scientists to develop better and faster supercomputers could be described as the human brain’s attempt at creating its equal. Today, supercomputers are already helping researchers gain insight into the complicated workings of our world and ourselves. Check out these ten features that put the “super” in supercomputer, and decide for yourself if the human brain has succeeded in rendering itself obsolete.


1. They’re super fast

The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Credit: Science China Press.

Supercomputers can handle much more information at once than the average desktop. Consider a plane-load of incoming tourists at an airport customs checkpoint. Only one counter is open, so only one passport is cleared at a time. This is serial processing, which takes place in normal computers.

A supercomputer, by contrast, is akin to having thousands of open counters at the customs checkpoint, allowing passengers to be split among the counters and cleared more rapidly. This is parallel processing, which puts the ‘super’ in supercomputing.

A desktop computer has a serial processing power of approximately 40,000,000,000 FLOPS (floating point operations per second—a standardized unit of measurement for processing power). The parallel processing power of the world’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Sunway TaihuLight, is 2.5 million times greater, at nearly 100 petaFLOPS. That’s a string of fifteen zeroes after the number 100!

NEXT >>>

Jeremy received his PhD from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he studied the role of the tumor microenvironment in cancer progression.

Related Stories from Asian Scientist

  • Striking A Balance Between Performance And Efficiency Striking A Balance Between Performance And Efficiency Given environmental concerns, supercomputers shouldn't just be fast—they have to be efficient too. Here's how supercomputing is moving towards a greener future.
  • The Race To Exascale The Race To Exascale Professor Lu Yutong shares how China’s past experiences have shaped the country’s supercomputing efforts, and calls for more collaboration among Asian countries.
  • How To Win The Nobel Prize Of Supercomputing How To Win The Nobel Prize Of Supercomputing Winning the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing requires a team effort, says Professor Fu Haohuan, a member of the 12-man team that won the competition in 2016.
  • The Next Supercomputing Superpower – Chinese Technology Comes Of Age The Next Supercomputing Superpower – Chinese Technology Comes Of Age The most powerful supercomputer in the world uses China’s home-grown technology. Could the country also be the first to build an exascale computer?
  • Getting A Headstart On HPC Getting A Headstart On HPC As high performance computing grows in relevance in various industries, Singapore Polytechnic is prepping its students for the future from the comfort of their classrooms.
  • CitySim CitySim Simulations and edge computing could help to tame some of the complexities of cities and make them more livable places for all, says Charles Catlett, director of the Urban Center for […]