Supercomputer makes a PC look like a little baby! I don’t know how it is so powerful compared to its counterparts.
In: Technology
The step that the comments I’m seeing (I don’t think it’s all the comments) are missing is that physically, they’re not all that super. They’re used for problems where you can break it up into lots of smaller parts that don’t depend on each other.
Let’s take weather prediction as an example. The equations that tell us how weather works (we think) are really complicated. But if you look at a really small area (say 100 meters by 100 meters), the complicated stuff goes away and it’s just a few additions and multiplications. But some of the stuff used comes from the adjacent cells (from the previous step: yesterday if your step size is 1 day) and some of its outputs need to go to the adjacent cells (for the next step). You could do it by hand, but if you have any sort of reasonable sized area it would take forever. It took Lewis Fry Richardson about 5 weeks to calculate a 1 day forecast. (Some time during World War I, published in 1922.) His plan was to have thousands of people in an auditorium, each computing one step and passing their results to the next person in line. (This was actually done [I think just hundreds] during the Manhattan Project. There’s also an interesting Matt Parker youtube video (standup_maths) of a similar process to calculate pi.) But in reality, it’s just too expensive to use people for calculations, so we have to use computers.
But if your computer only has one processor (the calculation part), it still takes forever. But you can break a lot of problems up so that one processor could do one or a few cells, and then for the next step use the results from its own and other processors, and so on. So to make a supercomputer, you need a lot of fast processors. I don’t know what we use now, but about 10 years ago we were using commercially available graphics cards.
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