Essay on Supercomputers: In today’s world computers have become an integral part of our day-to-day life. But it was not the like this before. Today we use computers for our work, for entertainment and to study as well as for communicating. Since the invention of computers, it has been upgraded. In the 1940s and in 1960 we only used these machines for simple calculations but today humans have created supercomputers that are capable of performing multiple tasks in a fraction of a second. It can be described as the most accurate, fastest and also powerful machine ever created by humans.
In addition to this, the machines called supercomputers have been updated and altered with time. If we talk about their speed, their speed can not be matched and they can be used without any limitation.
History of the Supercomputers
England was the first country to introduce supercomputers. They developed a supercomputer named Colossus in the year 1943. We could not believe today that it was only capable of handling literally only five thousand characters in a second. Again in the year 1950, England invented a supercomputer named Manchester Mark I. It was an updated version of the previous supercomputer which handled 500 instructions in one second. However, a major update in this invention happened in the year 1975 when a supercomputer was developed which was completely made of transistors. It was developed by Seymour Cray also known as the “Father of Supercomputing”.Cray used to design and developed supercomputers and named his first supercomputer by the name “Cray-I”.
Cray-I as mentioned before was a fully transistor-made supercomputer and hence was called an electronic computer. In 1976, it was sold to Los Alamos National Laboratory for a price of 8.8 million dollars. It was sold at such an expensive price due to the speed it provided. The speed of Cray-I was approximately 160 megaflops ie 160 million floating point operations in one second. Needless to say, it was an impressive speed at that time. In addition to this, it was also having a storage capacity of 8 MB or megabytes of main memory. Moreover, if we talk about its capability of storing words then it was approximately one million words.
Introduction of Supercomputers in India
Although in western countries the technology of computers was already in use since the 1940s yet India received its first computer in the year 1956 which was almost after a decade. The Indian government bought this computer at an expensive price of Rupees 10 Lakhs. It was named HEC-2M and was stationed at Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. It was a huge machine with dimensions in feet. It is impossible to believe today that our country’s first computer was of length 10 feet, breadth was 7 feet along with a height of 6 feet.
The Indian authorities used this machine efficiently as they formulated many policies such as the case of the planning commission that created five-year plans and also the annual plan. Above all, this computer also played a crucial role in India’s nuclear programme.
With the introduction of this computer in India, Indians started to pursue careers in this technology. In the later years, computers were designed and created and India also entered the period of supercomputers. Our then-Honourable Prime Minister VP Singh gifted our country with the first supercomputer named Cray-X-MP. It was imported from the US on the 25th of March in the year 1989. Additionally, it was purchased at a cost of Rupees 15 crores. Some of the main applications of this supercomputer were:
- Weather forecasting-It was done with the help of this supercomputer.
- Used in agro-meteorology programs.
- Used in operations regarding agriculture.
- Also used in the management of water resources.
In the era of 1980s, India tried to make deals with many western countries for the import of supercomputers but failed many times. Due to this, the government emphasized the production of supercomputers indigenously. As a result, India also designed and developed supercomputers and they are also included in the top 500 supercomputers in the world. The three indigenous supercomputers are as follows:
- PARAM SIDDHI-AI: To our surprise, it is ranked 89th in the ranking list featured globally. It is developed by our esteemed and nationally recognized institute C-DAC also known as the Center for Development of Advanced Computing.
- Mihir-Mihir is also a supercomputer which is also designed locally. It is owned by the National Center for Medium-Range and Weather Forecasting Institute and is ranked 187th among the top 500 supercomputers present globally.
- Pratyush-It is also a supercomputer which is ranked 107th among the top 500 supercomputers present all across the world. It is owned by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
Applications of Supercomputers
- It is widely used in the petroleum industry for the exploration of gas and oil.
- It also analyzes the seismic data.
- It was also used in analyzing the spread of covid-19 all across the world.
- Used to encrypt the data for the security of the nation.
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