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

GOING GREEN

WIND ENERGY:

Being a Hot Research topic amongst the leading universities of the world, Alternative energy has always given people high hopes of having a 100% efficient environment friendly source of generating power. But hopes such as these normally comes having a rigid price tag attached to it, this unfolds in shape of the economy of scale, the storage and the regulation of the generated power. These are the three phenomenons that engineers and scientists have a dream of finding a solution to. 

With the overpowering breakthroughs in technology, scientists and engineers around the world can breathe a sigh of relief, as the money that went into storing the power generated has been brought to the amount that went into its generation.

This has led many public and private sector power generating industries to take this green energy concept a bit more seriously, and they have initiated some extravagant projects even in Pakistan. 

Taking the concept of Wind power generation, some of the Universities of Pakistan are in active collaboration with the Local and some Multi-National industries. This has led to an increase in the level of research that was initially undertaken in the universities and in turn has encouraged the R & D organization to fund such initiatives.

The First wind turbine used to generate electricity was constructed by Charles F. Brush in the year 1887, which generated a mere 10 Kilo Watt of Power and since then there has been significant increase in the amount of power that a wind turbine can now generate; this is now measured in Mega Watt scale.

Offshore and Onshore wind farms are now developed and running in many countries of the world. This however, invited a lot of criticism from people living in the vicinity of those areas for taking up a lot of recreational space and claim to have reduce the 'scenic beauty' of that area.

The new age advancement in Wind power generation has been the development of Green airports and highways. Currently, Private sector Industries such as, ECONOMIA, are engaged in active collaboration with the universities of Pakistan for the design and development of ' Vertical Axial Wind Turbine System'. 

This project has the basic idea of generating electricity via the wind energy that a car generates as it speeds up and down a highway. The aim of this venture is to power the highway lights and make the highway such as the famous ' Motorway N-5' self reliant on electricity.
With power shortages becoming the major hurdle in an already economically down trodden country, this might come as a gust of zephyr under a warm sun.

The wind turbine is similar to VAWT Darrieus type but not identical. The rotor is made from 9 blades made out of glass fiber reinforced plastic (FRP)

Important Specs of the System are as follows:

Blades Length:  1200mm

Tower Base diameter: 18 inches

Wind turbine type: Permanent Magnet

Tower height: 9-12m

Output Voltage DC: 24/48/60V

GPRS/GPS: Inbuilt

With the advent of such a small scale power generation using a novel concept of utilizing the wind energy from a source that wasn’t thought about before is certainly mouth watering for the people who want to do something different in this field.

This paves way for other techniques of utilizing more or less the same principles and using it to the best use.
Speed Breakers at the end of the streets could be used to generate electricity to power the street lights at night. The force with which the car traverse on the breakers can also be put to good, proving that the sky is the limit. God Speed!