₪ Sashikanta ₪

Today’s fastest computer is 9600 times faster than the fastest computing in 1993.  The projection is that the fastest computer will be 200 times faster by the year 2017.

Some facts…

As on Nov, 07, the fastest computer system has been significantly expanded and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of 478.2 TFop/s (”teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second), compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago (http://Top500.org)

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, USA.
High Performance Computing systems use some or all of the technologies listed below:

• Scalable Clusters
• Multi-core and FPGA
• Grid computing, Distributed Computing
• Parallel programming & multithreading
• High-speed networking like Gigabit, Fiber channel and Infiniband
• High-speed & highly scalable storage
• High-speed IO systems like graphics

What is HPC? 

High Performance Computing (HPC) system is for those computing tasks which need excessive computing power.  HPC was traditionally known for Super computers used for the purpose of large research projects in Biology and physics, e.g.: Protein folding, testing virtual prototypes, Nuclear science, and computational fluid dynamics.  But in the growing internet world, there exists a need for HPC systems to process huge amount of data. HPC has now more usecases in Finance, Insurance, Pharma, Energy, Entertainment & Healthcare domain.