What is Supercomputing in the 21st Century?

While Supercomputing typically refers to the process of complex and large calculations used by Supercomputers, High Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of multiple Supercomputers to process complex and large calculations. Both terms are often used interchangeably.

Supercomputing is a form of High Performance Computing (HPC) that determines or calculates by using a powerful computer, a supercomputer, reducing overall time to solution.

Supercomputing technology comprises Supercomputers, the fastest computers in the world. Supercomputers are made up of interconnects, I/O systems, memory and processor cores.

Unlike traditional computers, Supercomputers use more than one Central Processing Unit (CPU). These CPUs are grouped into compute nodes, comprising a processor or a group of processors—symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)—and a memory block. At scale, a supercomputer can contain tens of thousands of nodes. With interconnect communication capabilities, these nodes can collaborate on solving a specific problem. Nodes also use interconnects to communicate with I/O systems, like data storage and networking.

A matter to note, because of modern Supercomputers’ power consumption, data centers require cooling systems and suitable facilities to house it all.

How fast is Supercomputing in the 21st Century?

Supercomputing is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). Petaflops are a measure of a computer’s processing speed equal to a thousand trillion flops. And a 1-petaflop computer system can perform one quadrillion (1015) flops. From a different perspective, supercomputers can be one million times more processing power than the fastest laptop.

What is the fastest Supercomputer as of 2024?

According to the TOP500 list (link resides outside of ibm.com), the world’s fastest supercomputer is Japan’s Fugaku at a speed of 442 petaflops as of

June 2021. IBM supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, garner the second and third spots, clocking in at 148.8 and 94.6 petaflops, respectively. Summit is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy facility in Tennessee. Sierra is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

To put today’s speeds into perspective, when Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976, it managed a speed of around 160 megaflops. One megaflop can perform one million (106) flops.

Supercomputing vs. High Performance Computing (HPC):

While Supercomputing typically refers to the process of complex and large calculations used by supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) is the use of multiple supercomputers to process complex and large calculations. Both terms are often used interchangeably.

Supercomputing vs. Parallel Computing:

Supercomputers are sometimes called parallel computers because Supercomputing can use parallel processing. Parallel processing is when multiple CPUs work on solving a single calculation at a given time. However, HPC scenarios use parallelism, too, without using a supercomputer necessarily.

Another exception is that supercomputers could use other processor systems, like vector processors, scalar processors or multithreaded processors.