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SUPERCOMPUTERS
A supercomputer is a computer with the fastest processing
speed in the world as at the time of its introduction. Theses computers are
used for numerically intensive tasks such scientific simulations, weather
forecasting, geological data analysis, molecular modelling, nuclear energy
research and structural analysis. The speed of these computers is calculated by
the number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) they can do, the
higher the FLOPS, the faster the computer.
Supercomputers are specially designed to be extremely quick at
handling huge amounts of numerical calculations, however they tend to perform
poorly when carrying out more generic computing functions. Their operating
systems are variants of UNIX and tend not to be suitable for use in smaller
computers.
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Seymour Cray (1925 – 1996) is regarded as the father of
supercomputers; he designed many of the supercomputers in throughout the 1960s
to the 1980s through his companies. He co-founded Control Data Corporation in
1957 and left them in 1972 to form Cray Research, which he again left in 1989
to found Cray Computer Corporation. For many years Cray and his companies
dominated supercomputing, however of the late the other companies such as IBM
and Thinking Machines Corporation have begun to provide some competition with
some of their products.
While military and scientific agencies continue to be the
major consumers of supercomputers, they are some areas of healthcare where they
have been applied.
Scientists at the American National Cancer Institute use the
IBM SP Power3 to speed up research into the causes and treatments for diseases
such as cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer’s Disease. United Healthcare, based in the
United States, uses also uses an IBM supercomputer to manage health benefit
products from Medicare and Medicaid.
In the United Kingdom, Pharmaceutical Stevenage uses a
supercomputer to speed up critical drug designs, while in Germany, at the
German Centre for Scientific Computing, one is used to run several projects in
the field of medical visualisation.
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