How do supercomputers work? Like I assume nasa and big govt have is it like a pc where you can play the best games best specs etc ?
In: 0
No. It’s essentially just a ton of computing power.
Going into the details gets a bit messy because of how GPUs/GPGPUs are utilized, among other things, but basically if you think of your CPU, either 4 cores, or 8 cores, or whatever. Those cores are basically “crunching the numbers”, so to speak, and the more cores you have, the more calculations youbcan do in tandem. So a “supercomputer” is kind of just a computer with lots and lots of cores. It can crunch a ridiculous amount of numbers in a short amount of time.
This effectively translates to things like being able to run complex algorithms and simulation systems, or develop machine learning based A.I. You can simulate a computer playing chess against itself a hundred billion times in the span of a week or two.
Check out the wiki for the Folding@home project. I don’t know what they’re doing now, but they used to have an app that would let them use people’s idle PS3 consoles all networked together as a sort of supercomputer to simulate protein folding. The whole “PS console supercomputer” thing is an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
Latest Answers