I was watching a TV program today and there was a commercial for Hewlett-Packard. They apparently make more computers than any other company and they make more supercomputers than any other company.
I thought what is the definition of a supercomputer? It is a computer that works at the highest possible speeds for handling data and can work with the largest of databases.
Further search showed the cost of a Cray supercomputer in 2012 started at 97 million dollars and could go up to 250 million. The Cray used at Oak Ridge labs in Tennessee can make 27 trillion calculations per second. It has 299,008 processors. It costs approximately eight million dollars a year just for electricity to run it. The building to house it and the machine room is 88,000 square feet. It is anyone’s guess how much it costs to pay the engineers, technicians, electricians and other professions required there.
Supercomputers are used for weather forecasting (I bet they are busy today with hurricane Irma), brute force code breaking ( they can find out passwords very quickly), nuclear test simulations, and molecular dynamics simulations. Nowhere was there any mention of spying on America’s phone calls, but well we are all grownups here and one has to think there is a distinct possibility of that happening.
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