When you think of a supercomputer, you think of either a huge machine that costs millions of dollars like the vector machines that used to be popular back in the day or, if you have been keeping up with the scene, you think of hundreds of computers hooked up into a high speed network fabric crunching mountains of data. While the latter’s a true enough picture of supercomputing, it doesn’t quite give the whole picture. Rather, it’s like the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As it turns out, thanks to the democratization of high performance computing, pretty much any lab or business can get hold of a compute cluster and get busy crunching numbers or designing molecules or doing a bit of CFD for that matter.
Having said that, if you look at the top 500 supercomputer list, it’s sad that India’s highest entry is Tata CRL at No. 85 while Japan and China both have two entries each in the top five with the US having the other one. One phenomenon that could influence the rise of supercomputing in India is the ongoing shift from using CPUs to GPUs. The latter offer a substantial uptick in processing power and Indian facilities like VSSC are employing this technology to good effect.
At the end of the day, supercomputing may seem esoteric but it influences our daily lives in many ways from the weather forecast to simulations that help ensure that our vehicles are safe in adverse conditions. Looking to the future, it’s quite possible that someday we will all have a supercomputer in our pockets or embedded in our vehicles. With the rapid advances in processing power on mobile devices and computers shrinking steadily, just as we went from ENIAC to the PC, today’s parallel supercomputer could well be tomorrow’s pocket computer.
