• Question: what are supercomputers?

    Asked by larron to Tom on 14 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Tom Nicholas

      Tom Nicholas answered on 14 Jun 2017:


      A supercomputer is mostly like a very large regular computer. Inside your laptop or PC there are multiple processors (probably 4 of them), which can divide up the work your computer has to do between them. If you ask your computer to do a big calculation, problem or simulation, then one processor will split the task up into 4 parts, and when each processor is done with their bit then the answers will be recombined to give the final answer. This is useful because the problem will only take one quarter of the time to be solved.

      Your computer might have 4 processors – supercomputers can have millions! When you give a supercomputer a job to do then it will split it into a million parts, so it should be a million times faster. They need be be in massive buildings and use loads of power to run all those processors.

      Because supercomputers can be used for all sorts of things including load of problems in science, countries compete to build the biggest and best supercomputers. At the moment China is winning, with a supercomputer called Sunway TaihuLight, which has 10,649,600 processors!

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