Today, i’m going to clear the basic confusions between supercomputers and normal computers Obviously we know that gaming and personal PC’s are just like a chimpanzee in front of Supercomputers! There is no competition, but for the sake of science let’s see the basic differences. If you want me to post a article about regular gaming pc parts and sharing info about them, just drop a comment at the bottom of this article, i will write it for you all!
Before reading on please first read this basic equation how a Flop is calculated as it would help you understand the whole concept deeply.
The formula is FLOPS = sockets * (cores per socket) * (number of clock cycles per second) * (number of floating point operations per cycle). Servers are the only computers that sometimes have more than one socket; for most home computers (desktop or laptop), “sockets” will be 1.
What are SuperComputers?
Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.
Want to know how to convert ghz to FLOPS (computing power)? then – Read Joe Zbiciak‘s answer to How do you convert GHz to FLOPS? on Quora
Gaming Computer
A gaming computer is an upgraded type or a special type of Personal or Office computer, which has significantly higher computing power. A Gaming Computer is specially designed for playing games, (boring). shit. Continuing let’s discuss the difference between Gaming PC’s and Supercomputers.
POWER (varies): A midrange build gaming computer would be likely to have an RTX 2060 (6.5 TFLOPS), RX Vega 64 (12.6 TFLOPS) like mine. 😉 – note that Vega is an extremely inefficient architecture for its TFLOP count) or RX 5700 (7.9 TFLOPS).
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add advertising hereSuper Computer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
Power (varies): 200 petaFLOPS (peak). SUMMIT, OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY (USA)
Below there is a data table given below of all the supercomputers based on their power and rankings all over the world, continue to read to understand all.
At the end of the article, you may think why i haven’t built a list of most powerful gaming computers as i have built a list of Supercomputers? Reason-
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add advertising hereIf you’ll look into the market and search for ready made Gaming Consoles and PC’s like DELL’s Alienware. Their prices will suck your kidneys out of your body as they are so costly. Most people including me have built my systems manually, in order to get the same performance w.r.t market computers at a very low cost. So i can’t show the custom pc’s over here in the list as every one has different config and all that shit, so we will only focus on World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers – Ran by Huge IT Companies like IBM, Google etc.
World’s most powerful supercomputers list-
1. SUMMIT, OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY (USA)
The world’s most powerful supercomputer today is Summit, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It occupies the equivalent of two basketball courts and achieves an impressive 148.6 petaflops thanks to its 2.41 million cores.
Sponsors U.S. Department of Energy Operators IBM Architecture 9,216 POWER9 22-core CPUs
27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs[1]Power 13 MW[2] Operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)[3][4] Storage 250 PB Speed 200 petaFLOPS (peak) Purpose Scientific research Web site www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/summit/
2. SIERRA, LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY (USA)
AT LLNL, THE SIERRA SUPERCOMPUTER WILL BE A 125-petaFLOPS (FLOATING POINT OPERATION PER SECOND) PEAK PERFORMANCE MACHINE, PROJECTED TO PROVIDE FOUR TO SIX SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE OF THE LAB’S CURRENT WORKHORSE SYSTEM SEQUOIA.
Active Scheduled delivery in fiscal 2018[1] Operators National Nuclear Security Administration Location Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Architecture IBM POWER9 CPUs
Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs
Mellanox EDR InfiniBand[2]Power 11 MW Memory 2–2.4 PiB[1] Speed 125 petaflops (peak)[2] Purpose Nuclear weapon simulations[3] Web site computation.llnl.gov/computers/sierra
IT ROSE OUT OF DOE’S COLLABORATION OF OAK RIDGE, ARGONNE, AND LIVERMORE (CORAL) PARTNERSHIP, WHICH IS CULMINATING IN THE DELIVERY OF LARGE- SCALE, HIGH PERFORMANCE SUPERCOMPUTERS AT EACH OF THE THREE NATIONAL LABORATORIES. IT WILL FEATURE TWO IBM POWER 9 PROCESSORS AND 4 NVIDIA VOLTA GPUs PER NODE. POWER 9s WILL PROVIDE A LARGE AMOUNT OF MEMORY BANDWIDTH FROM THE CHIPS TO SIERRA’S DDR4 MAIN MEMORY AND THE LAB’S WORKLOAD WILL BENEFIT FROM THE USE OF SECOND-GENERATION NVLINK, FORMING A HIGH-SPEED CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CPUs AND GPUs.
In a few decades, the strength of these giants has multiplied dramatically: in 1985 the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Cray-2, could process 1.9 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), or 1.9 gigaflops, the parameter used to measure the power of these machines. By comparison, a current PlayStation 4 game console reaches 1.84 teraflops, almost a thousand times more. Today, there are at least 500 supercomputers in the world that can exceed a petaflop, or one billion flops, according to the TOP500 list drawn up by experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee (USA). wikipedia
3. SUNWAY TAIHULIGHT, NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING CENTRE (WUXI, CHINA)
A Chinese supercomputer has topped a list of the world’s fastest computers for the seventh straight year ¨C and for the first time the winner uses only Chinese-designed processors instead of US technology.
The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of November 2018, is ranked third in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as divine power, the light of Taihu Lake. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. Wikipedia
The announcement on Monday (20 June 2016) is a new milestone for Chinese supercomputer development and a further erosion of past American dominance of the field. Last year’s Chinese winner in the TOP500 ranking maintained by researchers in the US and Germany slipped to second place, followed by a computer at the US government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This year’s champion was the Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi, Jiangsu. It was developed by the National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology using entirely Chinese-designed processors.
Until Summit and Sierra came into service in 2018, China was at the forefront of global supercomputing with TaihuLight, a machine built by the National Centre for Engineering Research and Parallel Computing Technology and installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Wuxi. Unlike other machines of its calibre, it lacks accelerator chips, so its 93 petaflops depend on its more than 10 million Chinese Sunway processors. wikipedia
4. TIANHE-2A, NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING CENTRE (GUANGZHOU, CHINA)
China also retains fourth place in the ranking with Tianhe-2A, or Milky Way 2A, developed by the National University of Defence Technology and equipped with Intel Xeon processors that allow it to reach 61.4 petaflops. According to its operators, the machine is use for computing related to government security
Tianhe-2 or TH-2 is a 33.86-petaflops supercomputer located in the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China. It was developed by a team of 1,300 scientists and engineers. Wikipedia
Sponsors 863 Program Location National Supercomputer Center, Guangzhou, China Architecture 32,000 Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C with 2.200 GHz 48,000 Xeon Phi 31S1P Power 17.6 MW (24 MW with cooling) Operating system Kylin Linux[1] Memory 1,375 TiB (1,000 TiB CPU and 375 TiB coprocessor)[1] Storage 12.4 PB Speed 33.86 PFLOPS Cost 2.4 billion Yuan (US$390 million)[2] Purpose Simulation, analysis, and government security applications.
5. FRONTIER, TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS (USA)
The Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin has entered the top 10 in global supercomputing thanks to Frontera, a new system built by Dell and equipped by Intel. Frontera was unveiled to the world in September 2019 as the world’s fastest supercomputer located in a university. Since June, it has been collaborating with three dozen scientific teams in research related to the physics of black holes, quantum mechanics, drug design and climate models.
Its 23.5 petaflops will be available to the scientific community, which will benefit from its computational capacity especially in the areas of astrophysics, materials science, energy, genomics and the modelling of natural disasters.
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