The computer world has been abuzz about quantum computers for many years back, but Quantum Computing is not only the future computational tools needed for research, Supercomputers can also be considered highly powerful than Quantum computing, provided enough research is also considered in its direction.
What is Supercomputer?
Without mincing words, we all understand what computer is and if not, you can read my post here. A supercomputer is not just a fast or very huge computer: it works in an entirely way that is different from ordinary computer: as against ordinary computer which is using serial processing, supercomputer is specifically using parallel processing just like human nerve cells and it does many things at once as against ordinary computer which does one thing at a time.
The different between serial processing which ordinary computers are built on and parallel processing which supercomputers and human nerve cells are also built on is not far-fetched:
Serial processing executes one instruction at a time i.e. it undergoes Fetch, Decode, Execute and Store cycle.
Parallel processing on the other hand, execute more than one process at a time, it can do trillions floating point per second teraflops, example network server, supercomputer
BRIEF BACKGROUND OF SUPERCOMPUTER
Most computers we are using nowadays are actually faster than the first commercially successful supercomputer, called ‘Control Data Corporation’ which was designed by Seymour Cray called ‘Cray-1’ in 1964. The Control Data Corporation could handle three million floating point operations per second (flops).
An ultimately faster technique of supercomputing was launched in the mid-1980s: and many transformations have been carried out till today, generally, any applications that is built on parallel processing has the ability to solve computational problems by simultaneously making use of multiple processors.
Today’s world’s fastest supercomputer is the Sunway TaihuLight in China which is packed with almost 10.65 million inteconnected processors or cores which later gives it the ability to do about 100 petaFLOPS. Fionn is the fastest supercomputer in Iceland and it has up to 8,200 processor cores, delivering a performance capacity of 147 million million FLOPS.
HOW IT CAN BE USED TO IMPROVE HUMAN LIFE SPAN
With the Super power in Supercomputer, the ability to enhance medical research and practice by such an high degree that it could elongate human life span by five to 10 years is there.
To have a clear understanding of how it can be used to increase human lifespan by five to ten(10) years, consider the latest computer we use nowadays, if these computers multiply several times and brought together as only one computer. This is what supercomputer mean.
As against the method of carrying out million instructions per second (MIPS) like ordinary computers do, a supercomputer’s performance is ranked in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).
The super power in Supercomputer makes it to acts fast and with high-level of computing performance and this will enables it to do more complex computing tasks, like nuclear research or weather pattern forecasting as one supercomputer is doing that in India.
IMPROVING RESEARCH
With these aforementioned features and capabilities, supercomputers can do a lot of useful research in medicine. Supercomputers can also run deep neural network or deep artificial intelligence learning, ability to enhance personalized medical care that uses advances in genetics. Examples of these AI systems contributing to medical research include IBM’s Watson and Google’s DeepMind. With the fact that conventional computing is being used in many of these system and could be significantly improved by supercomputers in a not too distant future. These improvements would allow them to deliver faster and more accurate diagnoses which will later enhance and improve human life span.
How I hope enough fund and much attention needed are giving to research in supercomputer or what do you think?
Thanks for reading!