How does a supercomputer work?

Before we start to know how supercomputer work, we have to know what is the supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a powerful computing unit that used for complex mathematically intensive scientific problems, including simulating nuclear missile tests, forecasting the weather, simulating the climate, and testing the strength of encryption.

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s with the Atlas at the University of Manchester. From the very beginning, scientists are trying to increase the amount of parallelism with one to four processors. It takes data as input then process it and generates some kind of output. But, it works in an entirely different way. Generally, computers are used serial processing, but supercomputer process data parallelly. Instead of doing one thing at a time, supercomputer does many things at once.

Let’s back to the topic that how supercomputer work?

An ordinary computer does one thing at a time, so it does things in a distinct series of operations, that's called serial processing. A modern supercomputer works much more quickly by splitting problems into pieces and working on many pieces at once. This process is called parallel processing. Parallel processing is more like what happens in our brains. Supercomputers normally make use of customized compute units called blades, which usually house multiple nodes of CPUs, GPUs.

A supercomputer has lots of processing units or nodes working together. Each of these nodes is made by the components which are mostly similar to a PC or laptop, but how they're connected together work simultaneously to solve the problem where calculation speed is more important than anything. For example - the Cray XK6 built by powerful blades where each blade contains four nodes. Each node houses a 16-core AMD Opteron CPU and Nvidia Tesla GPU, and 16 or 32GB of RAM. These nodes are connected together with a proprietary interconnect. Multiple blades are then stacked together in racks and allow for tens of thousands of nodes to be crammed into a large room.

Supercomputers work as molecular dynamics that means the way molecules interact with each other. Supercomputer simulations allow scientists to dock two molecules together to study their interaction. Researchers can determine the shape of a molecule's surface and generate an atom-by-atom picture of the molecular geometry. Molecular characterization at this level is extremely difficult to process by normal computers in a laboratory environment. However, supercomputers allow scientists to simulate such behavior easily.

In January 2018, the world's fastest supercomputer, the Sunway TaihuLight, Fujitsu K, has around 40,960 processing modules, each with 260 processor cores, which means 10,649,600 processor cores in total. It tackling really complicated problems that involve gigantic amounts of data.