10 Most Valuable Supercomputers
Are you ready to see the 10 most valuable supercomputers?
A supercomputer is a computer with a very high-level computational capacity. As of 2015, there are supercomputers which could perform up-to quadrillions of floating point operations per second.
Back in the early ‘60s, the first super computer was born and it was named Atlas. Installed in Manchester University, the supercomputer was far less powerful than what are you used to in these days.
Now, the first supercomputer is just a museum piece.
If you think about it, it is quite obvious that technology has evolved so much since the 60s. Furthermore, every five years, the supercomputers of today become obsolete, thanks to rapidly advancing technology in information and computer development and research.
The supercomputers from today are measured in PetaFLOPS, a processing speed equal to a million billion or a thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
These kinds of machines are made to help scientists and meteorologists forecast global warming and weather or to stimulate brain activity or to advance nuclear technology and security, and much more.
10. IBM Roadrunner (US) – $130 million
We start our list with the IBM Roadrunner that was built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Roadrunner became operational in 2008 and was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 PetaFLOPS. On May 2008 it became the first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 PetaFLOPS system, after it achieved 1.026 PFLOPS.
Eventually, this supercomputer reached a top performance of 1.456 PFLOPS later that year, retaining its top spot on the list.
Still in the same year it got the title of the fourth-most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world. The title was given by the Supermicro Green500 list.
The supercomputer was decommissioned on March 31, 2013, and replaced with a smaller, more energy efficient supercomputer called Cielo. The purpose of Roadrunner was highly classified: to model the decay of the US nuclear arsenal.
