UPSCpedia: Scienopedia - Supercomputing - Indian side

• Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including
  

  • quantum physics, 
  • weather forecasting, 
  • climate research, 
  • molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and 
  • physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion).
• Currently, Japan's K computer, built by Fujitsu in Kobe, Japan is the fastest in the world. It is three times faster than previous one to hold that title, the Tianhe-1A supercomputer located in China.
• A typical supercomputer consumes large amounts of electrical power, almost all of which is converted into heat, requiring cooling.

  • In the Blue Gene system IBM deliberately used low power processors to deal with heat density.
• Technologies developed for supercomputers include:
  • Vector processing
  • Liquid cooling
  • Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
  • Striped disks (the first instance of what was later called RAID)
  • Parallel filesystems

• Operating systems

  

  Supercomputers today most often use variants of the Linux operating system as shown by the graph.
• A special-purpose supercomputer is a high-performance computing device with a hardware architecture dedicated to a single problem.
• Examples of special-purpose supercomputers:
  • Reconfigurable computing machines or parts of machines
  • GRAPE, for astrophysics and molecular dynamics
  • Deep Crack, for breaking the DES cipher
  • MDGRAPE-3, for protein structure computation
  • D. E. Shaw Research Anton, for simulating molecular dynamics

Indian Supercomputing:

• India was one of the world leaders in this tech not long ago, but had been left far behind by other countries within a few years. 

  • China had come up from a nearabsent position to the top within a decade, now rivaling the US and Japan, and in a good position to overtake them soon in supercomputing resources and knowhow.
• There is a strong correlation between a country's access to supercomputing facilities and its achievements in science and technology
• After several meetings and a conference, the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister (SAC-PM) recommended a national programme on supercomputing at a cost of Rs 5-6000 crore.
• It would network India's scientists and engineers at a scale never achieved so far.
• Finally, when the first phase of the project is complete within four to five years, it would place enormous computing resources within easy reach of India's scientific community and the private sector.
• Climate researchers desperately need immensely-powerful machines; even weather forecasters need better stuff than they use now. 

  • So do material scientists, aerospace engineers, mathematicians and several other researchers.
• Use of supercomputers is expanding rapidly in the private sector too. 

  • Analysis of data from social networks sometimes needs supercomputers and would stretch the most powerful ones as data volumes increase in the future. 
  • Video analytics also needs high-speed computers, and so would data search, crash analysis, 3D animation, business data analytics and other every day business activities.