Supercomputers Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Supercomputers - Research Paper Examplea. The first supercomputer was put to use at capital of South Carolina University between 1954 and 1963 to find missile trajectories. The supercomputer was known as the IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator surefooted of performing 15,000 operations per second (Columbia University, 2013).c. Xie et al. (2010) emphasize that evolution in computer components facilitated the development of supercomputers. Beginning with an primaeval stage development, it evolved into vector supercomputer stage then flourished to massive parallel processing supercomputer stage and then evolved that to the cluster stage. Ever since late 60s, the performance of supercomputers has improved almost 10 times per spell of quaternary years surpassing even Moores law.Advantages of supercomputers are speed, accuracy, and capability to charter in unknown territories such as space-research, discovering genomes coding that are otherwise very difficult to perform. On disadvan tages side, its high cost and huge origin consumption can be cited. High power consumption leads to heat generation that in turn, increases tell on replacement of the important parts increasing its maintenance cost. Due to fast advances in computer land todays supercomputer can be redundant as time passes by (Newman, 2011).1. An IBM system installed at the U.S. Department of Energys Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008 is able to compute at the ordain of 1.026 petaflop per second. The system is nicknamed as Roadrunner. It is important to note that this is one of the most energy efficient systems during the time.The Square-Kilometer range (SKA) project aims at developing the largest radio telescope in the world for space research. This will be done by establishing a series of hundreds of smaller radio telescopes in the area of one-square kilometer. The purpose is to collaborate a vast amount of data extensively deep into the space. This will unfold how galaxies evolve and sec rets virtually dark matter and