WHAT IS SUPER COMPUTER ?

A supercomputer is a COMPUTER at the frontline of contemporary processing capacity – particularly speed of calculation which can happen at speeds of nanoseconds. 

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially and, for decades, primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm.

Systems with massive numbers of processors generally take one of two paths: In one approach (e.g., in distributed computing), a large number of discrete computers (e.g., laptops) distributed across a network (e.g., the Internet) devote some or all of their time to solving a common problem; each individual computer (client) receives and completes many small tasks, reporting the results to a central server which integrates the task results from all the clients into the overall solution. In another approach, a large number of dedicated processors are placed in close proximity to each other (e.g. in a computer cluster); this saves considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for the processors to work together (rather than on separate tasks), for example in mesh and hypercube architectures.

The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging trend; one can think of this as a small cluster (the multicore processor in a smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) that both depends upon and contributes to the cloud.

FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTERS OF THE WORLD TILL 2013 : 

As of November 2013, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer is the fastest in the world at 33.86 petaFLOPS, or 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

INDIA'S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUETR 

PARAM YUVA SUPERCOMPUTER

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has achieved a significant milestone with PARAM Yuva II supercomputer being ranked 1st in India, 9th in the Asia Pacific Region and 44th in the world among the most power efficient computer systems as per the Green500 List announced at the Supercomputing Conference (SC'2013) in Denver, Colorado, USA.

PARAM Yuva – II uses hybrid technology – processor, co-processor and hardware accelerators - to provide the peak compute power of 520.4 Teraflop/s using 210 kiloWatt power. The interconnect network comprises of homegrown PARAMNet-III and Infiniband FDR System Area Network. This system is designed to solve large and complex computational problems. 

The system has 200 Terabytes of high performance storage, and requisite system software and utilities for parallel applications development.

Supercomputers, in general, consume a lot of electrical power and produce much heat that necessitates elaborate cooling facilities to ensure proper operation. This adds to increase in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a supercomputer. To draw focus towards development of energy efficient supercomputers, Green500 ranks computer systems in the world according to compute performance per watt, thus providing a world ranking based on energy efficiency. 

Energy consumed by supercomputers is measured at various Levels – L1, L2, L3 - for purpose of reporting. As the level increases, accuracy and rigor of measurement exercise also increases. It is also a measure of our capability and noteworthy that C-DAC is the second organization worldwide to have carried out the Level 3 measurement of Power versus Performance for the Green500 List. 

Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communications & Information Technology, has congratulated C-DAC for this significant achievement. He said that supercomputing is very important for the all round advancements in the country, and the Government is planning a big impetus for capacity building and advanced R&D in this area. He would expect many more contributions from C-DAC, as a key player, in this endeavour.