SUPER COMPUTER

PAKISTAN FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER:

War driven country, battling out animosity, in its north-western and eastern borders round the year, Pakistan has always had other things to worry about than focusing on education. By the start of the year 2008, not one university of Pakistan was ranked in the world rankings of even the top 500 universities of the world.

But since then it has been a smooth road ahead for Pakistan in terms of education, as we see that the number of students graduating from universities have increased many folds.

Now National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Pakistan’s premier university in engineering is now ranked in at 58 in engineering and IT in Asia and 274 in the world (in the year 2010)

NUST-RCMS

On 7^th March, 2012, in a ceremony held at Research Center for Modelling and Simulations (RCMS), a constituent college of NUST revealed Pakistan’s fastest Supercomputer facility.

NUST-H12,Islamabad

This Supercomputer has the capability of reaching a magnanimous speed of up to 132 Teraflops which is more than 100 times faster than super computer  that India has currently, PARAM YUVA, which is capable of performing at 38.1 Teraflops, meaning  it can perform compute up to 38 trillion operations per second, but still a little short of the fastest that Pakistan’s arch rival possesses, SAGA-220, which has the performance of 220 TeraFlops.

SAGA-220

This research facility would benefit Pakistan in research projects relating to fluid dynamics and Bio Sciences. Its applications can be extended to be used in flood and weather forecasting and Oil & Gas exploration.
Speaking in the ceremony, Lt Gen. Muhammad Asghar, the rector of NUST, said that it would give our PhD scholars a level playing field to compete with the super powers of the world in the field of Information and Technology.

It should be also noted, that Pakistan is still behind the top 5 fastest supercomputers of the world by a long distance.

Here is the analysis and comparison of the top 3 Supercomputers of the world and where Pakistan stands in the line.

1) K Supercomputer:

K Supercomputer is currently the fastest Supercomputer in the world; this is placed in Japan and was made by Fujitsu, currently installed in RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science Campus in Kobe.

This Monster is capable of 10.51 Petaflops, which makes it 4 times faster than the combined performance of seven supercomputers that comes next in the line.

2) Tianhe-1A:

Located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, China, it was the fastest supercomputer for quiet sometime when it was replaced by K supercomputer and by a margin of 4, just goes to show the rapid pace of development in Technology in the world.

Capable of reaching speeds of up to 2.566 Petaflops, it over took the prevailing fastest supercomputer in October 2010, the Jaguar.

3) Jaguar:

With speeds of up to 1.75 Petaflops, it was the fastest in the world before China overtook the lead; it has a 224,256 x86- based AMD Opteron Processor cores and operates on LINUX.

Here is the table of Prefixes to better understand where each of them stands:

Computer performance
Name	FLOPS
yottaFLOPS	1024
zettaFLOPS	1021
exaFLOPS	1018
petaFLOPS	1015
teraFLOPS	1012
gigaFLOPS	109
megaFLOPS	106
kiloFLOPS	103