Supercomputers are among the greatest inventions of our time. These computers have helped us to learn about things that we never could have imagined. From the moon landing to the discovery of the Higgs-Boson Particle; from the periodic table to the discovery of gravitational waves, supercomputers have played a vital role. In this article, we explore how supercomputers have changed our lives.
SUPERCOMPUTERS IN THE MEDIA
New video illustrates the fastest supercomputers in the world! Performance comparisons between supercomputers and human brains explained. The evolution of supercomputers: from the earliest machines to today’s fastest supercomputers. In the past 50 years, supercomputers have evolved from giant machines that filled rooms to powerful supercomputers that can process information at the speed of light.
Supercomputers and their uses have been in the news a lot lately, and for good reason. They are some of the most complex machines in the world, and they can do a lot of different things. One of the things they do is help the world’s greatest minds to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. The most recent supercomputer to make the headlines is the Sunway TaihuLight, which is a Chinese supercomputer that is three times faster than the previous record holder. The Sunway TaihuLight has been featured in several news outlets, including one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, the Huffington Post.
The only thing that has changed is that computers have become faster. “Traditional supercomputers are built with a relatively small number of very fast processors,” says Teus Hagen, a computer scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The typical supercomputer will have a few thousand processors. “If you look at your smartphone, that has something like two billion transistors in it,” Hagen says. The iPhone 6, for example, has a dual-core 1.4-gigahertz processor. A supercomputer will have thousands of processors that run at 100 gigahertz, or even 500 gigahertz.
SUPERCOMPUTERS FOR THE MILITARY
We recently published an article on the topic of supercomputers and the power they hold. The point we were trying to make was that most of the supercomputers were originally designed for military purposes. As we are a military website, we felt that it might be a good idea to write a post about the military history of supercomputers.
There are many stories about the supercomputers that are being used for the military. They range from stories about the supercomputers that the military uses to simulate the effects of a nuclear bomb, to the supercomputers used to predict what will happen at the end of the world. But not many people know that the military has a supercomputer that has been nicknamed the “alien brain”.
This supercomputer can cross reference every function in the human brain and find the one that is malfunctioning. This may seem like something from a science fiction movie but this is actually what the supercomputer does. It can also read the minds of people who are suffering from PTSD, and determine what they are thinking. This is just one of the many stories that surround the supercomputers used by the military. There are many more stories about the supercomputers that are being used by the military.
SUPERCOMPUTERS FOR HEALTHCARE
On the third of November 2015, a supercomputer named IBM Watson was able to aid doctors in diagnosing a rare form of leukemia. This was a huge accomplishment for IBM and for the world of healthcare. Supercomputers have already made huge contributions in the healthcare industry and will continue to do so in the future. The ability to process information in seconds that would have taken several hours to days in the past, will help doctors and researchers to save lives.
In the United States, about 20 percent of patients discharged from hospitals return within 30 days. That number is growing, and the reasons are not entirely clear. It’s a costly trend, and one that is tough to predict and control. A new study from the University of Pittsburgh shows that inpatient readmissions are significantly higher in hospitals with higher numbers of Medicare patients.
Researchers looked at more than 100 hospitals across the country, then applied to the hospitals’ readmission rates a statistical model that identified which factors influenced the readmission rate. The model also identified which factors were statistically insignificant. “We could then use that model and run it on the rest of the nation’s hospitals, and it would predict the same readmission rate for each hospital,” says study author Casey L. Bond, Ph.D., assistant professor of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at Pitt’s Schools of the Health Sciences.
SUPERCOMPUTERS FOR SCIENTISTS
Supercomputers are a type of computer with a high-level performance ability, typically used in applications that could not be handled by a normal computer. They are mainly used in the fields of scientific research, meteorology, nuclear weapons design and cryptography. Supercomputer speeds are measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), which is a unit of computer performance indicating how many times faster a machine can perform a typical floating-point operation than a typical desktop computer.
Supercomputer have changed the way scientists and researchers work. These machines are so powerful that they are capable of simulating the interactions of particles inside atoms and even the development of galaxies. The newest supercomputers are as fast as 100 petaflops, meaning that they can perform at least 100 million billion calculations per second. A top-of-the-line consumer laptop can perform about one-tenth of that, at 10 gigaflops. Supercomputer are used for everything from weather forecasting to fighting cancer.
SUPERCOMPUTERS FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
Music production has taken a leap along with the technological advances in computers and the Internet. Although it seems that the recording industry has always been a meticulous process in places like studios, the fact is that even before computers, musicians and singers had been using high-tech equipment to create masterpieces. Since the beginning of the 20th century, musicians have been recording sounds on a variety of devices, including phonographs (1877), wire recorders (1925) and magnetic tape recorders (1930s). For example, the band America recorded its first album, America, in 1969 using a 16-track analog tape recorder.
The process of recording was so laborious that the band had to use the same tape to record multiple times. Computers are becoming more powerful every day, and that’s good news for musicians. One of the benefits of the digital age is that the music industry has become dramatically more sophisticated. Musicians can now record and produce high-quality audio at home with the help of computers and software. In fact, some industry insiders believe that computers have made music better. “I think good music is going to get better and better, and less and less expensive to make,” says Bob Ludwig, a Grammy Award-winning recording engineer. “The computer is the greatest recording tool ever invented.”
Conclusion
In this blog, you will learn more about the TOP 5 ways in which supercomputers have changed our lives. A good example of supercomputers being used for the good of humanity is when NASA came up with a supercomputer to design the Mars Rover. They were able to design the Mars Rover in a much shorter amount of time. This is just one out of the many ways in which supercomputer have changed our lives for the better.