Supercomputers are fancy machines. They have the capability of doing loads of tasks at the same time. But they are costly. They are only being used by the institutions of big nations for research purposes.
Sometimes nations do engage themselves in competition. Each big nation is trying to make the most powerful supercomputer. But some miss and some become successful in this challenge.
Recently, the US has become the top country in the world. It has been successful in creating the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is known as Frontier. It has been built by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. It has the capability of doing tasks of more than 1 exaflops. Previously, Japan was the top country. Its supercomputer, known as Fugaku, was the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It has a power rating of 442 petaflops.
India on the other hand, also has 25 supercomputers in total. Its top supercomputer ranks 102 on the strength list. Its supercomputer Param Siddhi AI has the computing capability of 3.3 petaflops.
The power of a supercomputer is measured on the Linpack benchmark. It is the universal scale for measuring the power of a supercomputer.
On the energy consumption front, the Frontier has a rating of 522 gigaflops of energy per watt of electricity. So Frontier is powerful as well as efficient.
The Frontier is an exascale supercomputer in a true sense. This is because Fugaku also demanded to be given the same respect for being the world’s first exascale supercomputer. Fugaku was able to attain the computing strength of more than 1 exaflops. But it is only proven in trial runs and not much in the real world. Frontier on the hand has the capability of doing 1.1 exaflops of computing in the real world.
So, these computers are going to make the research process much easier for scientists. They will be able to do much more tasks at hand. The major countries are now starting to realize even more the importance of such advanced machines. Slowly and steadily, India is also trying to play catch up on the field.
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