You know what’s better when it’s more
FLOPpy?
Super computers.
Hi everyone, Julian for DNews.
China has just announced it has created the
most powerful supercomputer yet.
The machine, named Sunway TaihuLight, is theoretically
capable of almost 125 petaflops, or 125 million
billion flops.
I don’t mean 125 million billion futbol
players, I mean FLOPS, a metric for computer
speed.
It’s an acronym which stands of Floating-point
Operations Per Second , which basically translates
to how many calculations they can do with
gigantic or infinitesimally small numbers
in one second.
Because supercomputers can do a hundred million
billion calculations every second, and because
the range of numbers it is able to use is
so incredibly large, supercomputers are perfect
for running models that deal with things of
all sizes, from how galaxies form to how atoms
interact.
In other words they’re ideal for science.
Every time we mention on DNews that an experiment
used a computer model, they did it on a supercomputer.
These computers can be privately owned, as
is the case with some pharmaceutical companies
that use them to model how a drug will behave
on a molecular level.
Super computers can be ludicrously expensive
though.
Sunway TaihuLight cost $270 million dollars
to research, develop, and build.
And that’s before the costs of operation
are factored in.
Imagine how much electricity it takes to run
a computer as big as your house.
And how much it would cost to keep it cool
so said house didn’t melt itself.
For that reason more often they’re paid
for by a government and then that government
decides what experiments are awarded access.
Sometimes supercomputers are built with just
one purpose in mind, like IBM’s Deep Blue
which was made to beat one guy at chess in
1997.
Two years later they made Blue Gene with the
purpose of studying how proteins folded and
to make a really lame pun.
Usually though supercomputers can be general
purpose.
They’ve been used to test nuclear weapons,
not just the explosion themselves, but everything
that could affect how they work from when
they’re pulled out of storage to when they
go off.
Even things like how much a transport truck
rattles could have an effect on a nuclear
missile's guidance system, so it’s factored
into the calculations.
And all this can be done without actually
setting off a nuke, so they’re making our
deadly weapons safer…
I guess?
Supercomputers are invaluable to astronomy
and cosmology, modeling the first few moments
after the big bang on an atomic level, or
what happens during a supernova.
They’ve been instrumental in simulating
how a protein can fold itself because they
can track how every single atom would interact
with those around it.
This can also be used to figure out why proteins
sometimes go wrong and cause diseases.
And for our day to day lives they have been
most noticeably useful for predicting the
weather, taking in information from hundreds
of thousands of weather stations around the
world and comparing it to the data from yesterday
to predict what will happen tomorrow.
Extending that much farther and using averages
instead of specifics, supercomputers can be
used to simulate climate change.
They’re the only beasts powerful enough
to take in the many many variables that go
into predicting the climate far into the future.
And there’s still room for improvement.
When they crack the next milestone in speed,
the exaflop, or a billion billion flops, scientists
think they’ll be able to make a fully coupled
earth system model that is accurate down to
a kilometer.
Every variable a scientist could want to include,
of the entire earth, down to a kilometer resolution,
all calculated before I die of old age.
That’s what I call a super model.
If there’s one thing you don’t need a
supercomputer for, it’s creating your own
website, and you can stake your claim to a
corner of the internet thanks to Domain Dot
Com.
No domain extension will help you tell your
story like a DOT COM or DOT NET domain name.
And because you watch DNews, you can get 15%
off Domain Dot Com’s names and web hosting
by using the code DNews when you check out.
Today’s supercomputers build on the foundation
laid down by the earliest computer scientists.
With that in mind, we salute Ada Lovelace,
the OG computer nerd.
Trace tells you her story here.
If you had access to a supercomputer, what
would you use it for?
