FREE online courses on Information Technology - Chapter 6 IT - FUNDAMENTALS - Powerful Supercomputers

 

Mainframe computers are not fast enough for some applications. The mainframe computer was originally developed for business use. IT has features to enhance the processing of business data involving character manipulation and decimal arithmetic. Scientists and engineers have computationally intensive problems to solve, often involving numbers with many digits of significance. Examples include the simulation of airflow over an aircraft, weather forecasting simulations, analysis of geographical data, and even predictions about the speed of a sailboat designed for the Americas Cup Competition.

 

Companies such as Cray Research manufacture supercomputers. Supercomputers are among the fastest computers today, with speeds measured in hundreds of megaflops (a megaflop is the execution of 1 million floating point instructions per second) to more than a gigaflop (1 billion floating point instructions per second). Several companies are trying to achieve a teraflop machine able to execute 1 trillion instructions per second! Some experts argue that the future of high speed computing is in massively parallel machines (described below) or by combining the power of a number of individual workstations connected with network.

 

Minis: The Beginning of the Revolution

 

The next type of computer to develop was the mini. Companies such as DEC found that with integrated circuits they could build a highly cost effective small computer with an 8 or 16-bit word length. Minis became very popular as stand-alone time-sharing computer and as machine dedicated to a department in a corporation.

 

Mini computers evolved as manufactures increased processing speeds and expanded word sizes to 32 bits. These computers can be classified as “midrange”. IBM claims to have sold more than two hundred thousand of its midrange AS/400 system. Companies use their midrange computer for a variety of processing tasks, some of which are similar to what a mainframe did a decade ago. A firm might use this compute for all of its processing. A geographically dispersed company could have AS/400 computers at various geographic locations connected to a large machine at head quarters. Third parties have developed thousand of applications for the AS/400 as well.