“A child's PlayStation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996”. — Erik Brynjolfsson

As the world is moving forward technology is just keep getting better since there is always a place for improvement in almost every piece of technology such as making things more efficient, more compatible, more precise, faster, etc. There is no end. This addresses the need for supercomputing.

But what is supercomputing?

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.

What is the need for supercomputers?

Now you may be wondering, do we need that much high computing power right now for day to day work then the answer is not, as an individual we don’t need supercomputers but as government organizations like the military for testing nuclear weapons, as a space organization like NASA to test all the possibilities that can occur during a space mission like going to mars and come back safely, for scientific research like predicting climate change by running a gigantic amount of conditions so we are prepared for any situation in the coming future even how worse it is.

And the end of the spectrum, molecular interactions between cells and drug compounds are also extremely complex just on the nanoscale, and computer models of these interactions allow us to see the actual mechanism of how diseases make us sick and how different medicines could interrupt those interactions, etc.

Are there any demerits?

As you are aware everything in the current world comes with a price, same case apply to these supercomputers that provide us supercomputing a single one has a price tag of hundreds of millions of the dollar and they require a huge amount of electricity to run and area that is large enough to cover two tennis courts or maybe more. And just like with humans, running makes computers hot, so computing facilities consume even more energy and cold water to cool the computers down to keep them at optimum performance. Computers that are unrivaled in their power are also unrivaled in their complexity.

Countries in the race.

1. Japan’s Supercomputer Fugaku, built by Fujitsu and installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science.
2. The U.S. Summit supercomputer, built by IBM and housed at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
3. The U.S. Sierra supercomputer, built by IBM, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, and housed at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
4. China’s Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by the country’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology. It’s installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi.
5. U.S. tech company Nvidia’s Selene, which has been installed in-house.

Right now U.S and CHINA are the leading nations in developing and making their supercomputer more powerful followed by other countries like Japan and Germany. But again, the machine hardware itself is just the skeleton of exascale computing. To bring that maximum power to bear on some of the most complex problems scientists are trying to untangle today, there’s a whole lot more going on behind the scenes. So both the current and coming software engineers are ready because a lot of things depend on you.