The most powerful processor. Top-list of supercomputers

A few decades ago, no processor could compare with what is in the average computer. Now the situation has changed radically. Home PC-systems for a long time no one is surprised, although they are hundreds of times more powerful than a computer of the 70's. The imagination of our contemporaries is struck by a completely different machine - a supercomputer. It is based on the most powerful processor.

As a rule, such machines are owned not by an individual, but by a whole state. All supercomputers in the world are counted and taken into account, because they are indispensable not only for science. The number of supercomputers determines the prestige of the country: the more of them, the stronger the state that owns them. The first list of supercomputers appeared in 1993 and was named "Top-500". Since then, it is updated twice a year. This rating is produced not for the sake of state ambitions. "Generating" a competitive atmosphere, it stimulates the progress of high technologies. The country with the most powerful processor in the world occupies the first place in this "top-list".

Until recently, the leader of this list were the States, but after the last update, the Americans were pressed by Japan and China. America remained the leader only in the number of supercomputers, but the most powerful of them "settled" in Asia. So, who owns the most powerful processor? Today there are two supercomputers with such processors. One developed the Japanese company Fujitsu. The brainchild of this company is called K-computer. Prefix "K" Is deciphered as "ten quadrillion", however, the Japanese put in it one more value. "K" in their understanding means "main computer".

"Top-500" Japanese car is headed for two years, however, in the summer of 2011 it was not yet so powerful. Then K-computer consisted of 672 modules. The total number of Vmi-core processors that provide the computing power of a supercomputer exceeded 68,000. Each CPU was called SPARC64 and was designed by Fujitsu engineers. In one second this monster produced 8.16 quadrillion operations. Having created the most powerful processor, Japanese scientists have not calmed down. They brought the number of CPUs of their supercomputer to 88128. Thanks to this, the number of operations increased to 11.28 quadrillion. It is noteworthy that with this performance K-computer consumes little power, and it looks rather compact. The reason for this is the liquid system, with which the components of the machine are cooled. The supercomputer is controlled by the Linux system, and it is intended for global scientific Calculations.

What is the most powerful processor that has become a competitor of the Japanese miracle? Of course, the Chinese system Ttianhe-1A, which K-computer ousted from the first place. The American supercomputer Jaguar got only the third place. The parameters of these machines are also impressive, because they consist of thousands of processors and video cards, and their memory is measured not in terabytes, but in petabytes. Russia lagged behind the leaders of the list quite strongly. According to the total number of supercomputers, it stopped on the seventh line - there are only twelve in Russia, and the power of each is considerably inferior to Japanese and Chinese machines.

Looking at these technological advances, it seems that the most powerful computer has already been invented. However, there is no limit to perfection. Perhaps in a year we will be surprised by a new miracle machine.