What is a “super computer” and what can it do?
In: Technology
A super computer is just a big powerful computer.
In the 60-70’s super computers were single powerful computers like the famous CRAY-2. The appearance of the CRAY-2 is quite distinctive and is still used as the symbol to represent super computers to this day. This was the era of mainframe computers where a single computer was shared between everyone in a building using terminals. The idea of individual PCs on everyone’s desk hadn’t been figured out yet.
While today what we call a super computer is in fact a cluster of 100’s of regular servers working together as a single machine. If you walked into a server room with a super computer in it you probably wouldn’t recognize it as such, it just looks like any other server room full of identical rack mounted servers.
Such a computer uses distributed processing, meaning that a task is broken up into smaller pieces by a command and control server and distributed to individual ‘nodes’. This way a super computer can spread out the workload of a large mathematical problem across the nodes and perform the work much much faster than on an individual machine.
Super computers are used to process very large mathematical models like calculating the trajectory of millions of theoretical stars around a galaxy of the period of millions of years.
Running such models while tweaking the variables gives us ~~incite~~ insight into the nature of things like gravity.
At a fundamental level though the individual nodes are just powerful servers with the same types of CPUs and memory as your PC. So they could theoretically do anything your PC at home does, just a lot faster.
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