Supercomputing
by Andrej Bibic
1. What are they used for?
1.1. Meteorology
1.2. Science
1.3. Simulations
1.4. Military use
2. Developing countries
2.1. USA
2.2. PR China
2.3. Germany
2.4. Switzerland
2.5. Japan
3. Hardware
3.1. Thousands of processors
3.2. Parallel supercomputers
3.3. Cooling problems
3.4. Energy usage
3.4.1. Around 4.04 Megawatts
4. Performance measurement
4.1. Transfer rate
4.1.1. Floating-point operations per second (FLOPS)
4.1.2. Million instructions per second (MIPS) (Not in use)
4.2. Capability vs capacity
5. History
5.1. 1920s
5.1.1. New York World: First use of the word supercomputer (1929.)
5.1.2. IBM Tabulators
5.2. 1950s & 1960s
5.2.1. Control Data Corporation (CDC)
5.3. Seymour Cray
5.3.1. CDC 6600 (First supercomputer) (1964)
5.3.2. Cray Research
5.3.2.1. Cray-1 (1976)
5.3.3. Silicon transistors
6. Operational systems
6.1. Custom tailored to gain top speed
6.2. New trend
6.2.1. Generic software (Linux)