What is a “super computer” and what can it do?
In: Technology
I work with super computers on some projects for work.
In many types of science, engineering, and even movies, there are lots of tasks that require individual processing. Let’s say you are making a movie, and on each frame you are trying to simulate a fire, the scene lasts 30 seconds, and there are 24 frames per second.
For each of the 720 frames, the computer has to do the math to make the flame graphics look realistic, and then overlay the fire on the original picture. The more realistic the flames, the longer it will take to calculate for each frame. You could do this on your computer at home, and process each frame in sequence. This would take a very long time, especially because fire simulations require a lot of math and physics to make look good.
The main feature of a super computer is that it has a lot of processors. You can think of a processor as a person who is doing a job. Your home computer could have anywhere from 1-16 workers, depending on what kind of computer you have. Let’s say your fire special effects take 1 minute to calculate per “job”. If you do them all in series, it would take 720 minutes. If you have a better home computer, you could (optimally) assign each of the 16 workers in your computer a frame, and they would each put the fire simulation on your frame simultaneously. With 16 workers, your scene would (optimally) take 45 minutes to finish.
A super computer has thousands upon thousands of workers. If you had access to a personal supercomputer for your fire scene, you could do your fire simulation simultaneously on each frame individually. This means your scene would (optimally) be ready to watch in 1 minute.
In real life, super computers are used for movies, physics, science, engineering, and website applications. If you have some kind of job that needs done, that doesn’t depend on other jobs being finished, you can give each job to a worker, and each worker finishes simultaneously.
Imagine back in the old days when they would mine gold by hand. If you are running a mining company and only hire one miner, you can only mine as much gold as that one person can mine. However, if you hire 100 gold miners, you can mine gold ~100x faster. A super computer simply takes large, complex tasks, like modeling the air flow on airplanes, or how water moves in the ocean, and divides the tasks up into smaller jobs, and gives those jobs to the thousands of workers so that your job can finish faster.
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