What is a Supercomputer?
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A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers.
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Generally, PETAFLOP is a measure of a Supercomputer’s processing speed and can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
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FLOPS (floating point operations per second) are typically used to measure the performance of a computer’s processor.
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Using floating-point encoding, extremely long numbers can be handled relatively easily.
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Applications: Supercomputers are primarily designed to be used in enterprises and organizations that require massive computing power. For example: weather forecasting, scientific research, intelligence gathering and analysis, data mining etc.
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Globally, China has the maximum number of supercomputers and maintains the top position in the world, followed by the US, Japan, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
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India’s first supercomputer was PARAM 8000.
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PARAM Shivay, the first supercomputer assembled indigenously, was installed in IIT (BHU), followed by PARAM Shakti, PARAM Brahma, PARAM Yukti, PARAM Sanganak at IIT-Kharagpur, IISER, Pune, JNCASR, Bengaluru and IIT Kanpur respectively.
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In 2020, PARAM Siddhi, the High-Performance Computing-Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) supercomputer, achieved global ranking of 62nd in Top 500 most powerful supercomputer systems in the world.