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Huge Supercomputers Still Exist. Here’s What They’re Being Used for Today

Source: How-To Geek

modern supercomputers in the server room of datacenter
Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock

Supercomputers were a massive race in the 90s, as the US, China, and others all competed to have the fastest computer. While the race has died down a bit, these monster computers still used to solve many of the world’s problems.

As Moore’s Law (an old observation stating that computing power doubles roughly every two years) pushes our computing hardware further, the complexity of the problems being solved increases as well.

While supercomputers used to be reasonably small, nowadays they can take up entire warehouses, all filled up with interconnected racks of computers.

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What Makes a Computer “Super”?

The term “Supercomputer” implies one gigantic computer many times more powerful than your simple laptop, but that couldn’t be farther from the case. Supercomputers are made up of thousands of smaller computers, all hooked up together to perform one task. Each CPU core in a datacenter probably runs slower than your desktop computer. It’s the combination of all of them that makes computing so efficient. There’s a lot of networking and special hardware involved in computers of this scale, and it isn’t as simple as just plugging each rack into the network, but you can envision them this way, and you wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Not every task can be parallelized so easily, so you won’t be using a supercomputer to run your games at a million frames per second. Parallel computing is usually good at speeding up very calculation-oriented computing.

Supercomputers are measured in FLOPS, or Floating Point Operations Per Second, which is essentially a measure of how quickly it can do math. The fastest one currently is IBM’s Summit, which can reach…

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