While my son eagerly watching the
movie Jurassic Park-Part one, I had a chance to watch it again. In that movie
they mentioned that the Dinosaur was genetically modeled and created using
complex process with the help of supercomputers. I just laughed loudly by
hearing this statement. Oh ho… supercomputers, those are less powerful than our
day today smart phone.
Recently
I had undergone a workshop about PARAM shavak – A super computer in a box
system. Many things are revealed about supercomputers. The supercomputers are
certainly with very high-speed and memory. But the word high speed is
misleading. The correct meaning can be understood in this way. It consists of
many off the shelf components equipped with parallel computing which are
a thousand times faster than our personal computers. The performance of a
supercomputer is measured in terms of FLOPS (floating point operations per
second). These are used to solve the complex scientific calculations in
Nuclear science , nano science , seismic programming and climatology etc. The
high performance computing means solving the complex scientific problem
(problem which can be modeled scientifically) via supercomputers, fast
network, large storage and visualization.
Tianhe-2, a supercomputer
developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology is number one
supercomputer in the universe with the performance of 33.86 petaflop/s. The
power requirement is 17,808 KW which costs 3,120,000 Crores. Oh my God….At
number two we have Titan from United States with 17.59 petaflop/s. India's
PARAM Yuva-II with the performance of 360.8 Teraflop/s ranks 44th among world's
most power efficient supercomputers. PARAM denotes parallel machines. C-DAC
(Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) developed this system. Now they
have come up with the PARAM Shavak. Shavak denotes cub . It’s a supercomputer
in a box system.With this it is possible to undergo all kinds of research very
easily. I am just enlightened by knowing all the facts.
