The Super Computer....
As the name implies
is the top of the hierarchy of computers.
It is simply designed for ultimate processing power.
Such power is not used
for your average application but for major projects involving huge amounts
of calculations such as Weather-Forecasting, Engineering, Design and even
Chess.
The term SuperComputer has been around
since about the 1920’s but it really came to the fore in the late
1960’s -1970’s when Seymour Cray
then at the Control Data Corporation led the market in super computer design.
He left the CDC and formed his own company
Cray Research and continued to make the
fastest super computers of the day, one of which was the Cray-2
world's fastest computer 1985–1989.
The creation of today’s Super Computers have been taken over by the
larger companies such as IBM they are also
the producers of the fastest present day Super-Computer called the Blue
Gene.
Power of this kind comes at a cost and can only be tackled by well financed
companies for projects of this size.
To give you an insight into the scale of these project’s we have the
previous world-leader, the Earth Simulator
designed by NEC which has a total of 5,120
Processors involved running simultaneously and running at a top speed of
35.86 T-flops.
Compare this to the present leader which has a top speed of 135.5 T-flops
and uses a total of 32,768 processors.
These Computers are genuinely the super computers that there name suggests.
COMPUTERS THROUGH THE COMPUTER AGE
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