Supercomputers Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Supercomputers - Research Paper Example a. The first supercomputer was put to use at Columbia University between 1954 and 1963 to find missile trajectories. The supercomputer was known as the IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator capable of performing 15,000 operations per second (Columbia University, 2013). c. Xie et al. (2010) emphasize that evolution in computer components facilitated the development of supercomputers. Beginning with an early stage development, it evolved into vector supercomputer stage then flourished to massive parallel processing supercomputer stage and then evolved further to the cluster stage. Ever since late 60s, the performance of supercomputers has improved almost 10 times per spell of four years surpassing even Moores law. Advantages of supercomputers are speed, accuracy, and capability to charter in unknown territories such as space-research, discovering genomes coding that are otherwise very difficult to perform. On disadvantages side, its high cost and huge power consumption can be cited. High power consumption leads to heat generation that in turn, increases frequent replacement of the important parts increasing its maintenance cost. Due to fast advances in computer field today’s supercomputer can be redundant as time passes by (Newman, 2011). 1. An IBM system installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008 is able to compute at the rate of 1.026 petaflop per second. The system is nicknamed as "Roadrunner". It is important to note that this is one of the most energy efficient systems during the time. The Square-Kilometer Array (SKA) project aims at developing the largest radio telescope in the world for space research. This will be done by establishing a series of hundreds of smaller radio telescopes in the area of one-square kilometer. The purpose is to gather a vast amount of data extensively deep into the space. This will unfold how galaxies evolve and secrets about dark matter and