Computers exist in our life for quite a long period of time. We use computers and smartphones in our daily life. The computer and other devices we use are much faster than early computers. Supercomputers in 1990 had less processing power than the smartphones we are using today. Technology is changing very fast day by day. There are some tasks that a normal computer cannot perform. Some tasks like nuclear testing and weather forecast require high computational power. To perform billions of calculations per second we need a high-speed computer. So the supercomputer is used to speed up the processing of tasks.
From last few years, China is dominating the supercomputer market. China and Japan have the fastest supercomputers in the world. But now a new supercomputer named Summit is developed by the U.S that has more speed than any other supercomputer. Summit has about 35,000 processors attached to it. To run this supercomputer, a lot of electricity is needed and it also needs a special cooling system.
Some of advantages and disadvantages of supercomputers are discussed below.
Advantages of supercomputer
Can decrypt any password:
As supercomputers have much faster speed so it can guess any password. It can decrypt any phrase or password used in a computer or any other device.
High processing time:
The processing time of the computer is calculated in FLOPS (Floating point operations). The normal home computer can process from 10 to 100 GigaFLOPS per second. While supercomputer is 100 to thousand times faster than a home computer. The supercomputer can complete tasks in seconds that a normal computer takes hours or days to complete.
Environment safety:
Sometimes it is not safe to do real-time testing like testing nuclear weapons and medical testing. So supercomputers allow us to perform tests scientifically which is safe for the surrounding environment.
Cost efficiency:
Companies that require fast work and more efficiency in work get supercomputer on a part-time basis. By doing this a company can save money and time also.
Used for filming:
To make complex animation in movies, the supercomputer is also used. It can faster the speed of rending the animation and give a good result.
Disadvantages of supercomputer
A lot of electricity used:
A supercomputer requires a lot of electricity to run. A supercomputer like Summit can consume energy equal to 5000 houses.
A lot of areas required:
It requires a lot of space to place supercomputer. For example, the summit requires 5600 square feet of area.
Trained staff needed:
To do maintenance of supercomputer, it requires trained people. A normal computer technician cannot operate on a supercomputer.
Some other disadvantages of the supercomputer are:-
- They heat up quickly due to a large number of processors and load on devices.
- Sometimes the bandwidth of data not synchronized with the hard drive storage. So the speed of processing is disturbed.
- It is very expensive to build supercomputer and maintenance of supercomputer is also very expensive. It costs more than $1000 to rent a supercomputer for an hour. And some supercomputers costs in million dollars for electricity expense per year.
- Due to heat up problem, most devices get damaged quickly. So replacing of devices is also the other