Circuit Technology
...ers through the use of innovative designs that allow them to perform many tasks in parallel, as well as complex engineering. This ability to perform many tasks in parallel is one of the main factors that separate regular computers from supercomputers; but there is an even bigger factor, memory hierarchy. The memory hierarchy is a very carefully designed to ensure the processor is kept fed with data and instructions at all times. This is the major difference between a personal computer and supercomputers. Imagine if your computer never took a break and was always performing a calculation that it was fed? Wouldn’t that result in a more efficient computer? If a person was working at a job and always took an hour break for lunch and another hour break for dinner, he would be missing two hours of work, right? But what if, the same person worked the whole work period straight through and never stopped, wouldn’t that be more efficient? As the speed of supercomputers increases and they become more “intelligent”, people have had to think up new methods to make them faster. One of the newest methods that has developed is the use of entirely new technologies of circuit miniaturization. These technological advances can be included in a plethora of small storage devices. The small evidence that most consumers see of this new technology is found in “smart cards.” A new type of chip that enables Pocket PC and Digital Camera users to store a great amount of data on a very slim and small card, roughly the size of half a credit card. Some of these new chips that are being created are ten thousand times smaller, and more powerful than any current models released to the public. Although supercomputers are all very fast, they are numerous types of supercomputer architectures. The two most common of these is vector and parallel. A best way to show the difference between these two is by giving an example of them. A vector computer could represent a person solving thirty math problems in consecutive order, and a parallel computer can represent thirty people each solving one math problem in the series. Even if the person that represents a vector computer were a math genius, thirty people would be able to solve the series much quicker. With so much power, a person might wonder why you would need so much power in a computer? This is where the true wonder of supercomputers comes into play. Here are just a few things that supercomputers have done and are still working on: modeling of real worlds, complex systems such as fluid dynamics, weather patterns, seismic activity prediction, nuclear explosion dynamics, astrophysics computation, and brute-force code breaking. As you can see, most of these uses require vast amounts of computing power and technology. That is why companies, universities, and Government’s...