Today I want to talk to you about an interesting question which was asked by a high school student. He was asking how many instructions are supercomputers capable of processing. As it turns out, the student was actually looking at the speed of the new mobile device which is known as a smartphone. When he measured the time it took for his computer to complete this task, he discovered that it was about 35 nanoseconds per second.
Now, to give you a better understanding of what he was talking about, here’s a little bit of information about how supercomputers work. A supercomputer is one of those machines which has a central processing unit (CPU) and multiple main processing units (MPU). These machines are so powerful that they can perform calculations on billions of data patterns using just one instruction. To give you an idea about what he was talking about, think of a calculator which has a program that takes all the different factors involved in a calculation and then calculates the answer.
This is what an algorithm is, it’s simply a series of instructions that tell the computer how to calculate an answer. Today, a smartphone has the ability to perform many such calculations which enable it to beat other traditional calculators on several occasions. In fact, the latest smartphones have even been found to be able to beat web browser answers! This means that the smartphone has now surpassed the long standing and widely accepted favorite calculator, the calculator!
However, this does raise a problem for us humans. How many instructions are there which are able to run through a hardware device and then calculate the answer? The short answer to this is that there are none, because there is nothing which runs from your computer to hand. But this doesn’t mean that a mobile computer answer cannot be computed, it can if the right hardware is used.
How Many Instructions Are Supercomputers Capable Of Processing?
The new desktop which is coming to your desk may well allow you to compute the answer to the question how many instructions are currently running through your PC. However, what this also means is that a mobile computer cannot do this either. Mobile computing in a new wave is centered around using hand held devices such as tablets, phones and even netbooks to aid users in computing. No such device exists yet which can run on a PC, so these calculations will have to come from somewhere else.
It’s therefore safe to say that the only way to get the answer to how many instructions are running is by accessing a server using one of the following server types: ARM, MIPS, THM or SRAM. ARM is an ARM architecture which is used in many cell phone handsets which is basically ARM processors inside them. This is the new desktop, which is coming to your desk. MIPS is a number used for calculating large numbers and THM is a term that stands for transaction rate or throughput. The ARM architecture is what is used in the new desktop and is what powers your cell phone, which is probably the fastest growing mobile device today.
Now for the really interesting part; the question how many instructions are processed every second is really answered by the throughput, which is the maximum number of instructions processed per second by any given processor. This number is simply the maximum number of instructions that can be executed within a certain time. Obviously, the speed at which this occurs varies depending on how many instructions are being run at once. So it is possible that your current desktop can be doing thousands of instructions per second but because your processor is ARM based you will run into a performance hit, so don’t be concerned if this happens as this is perfectly normal.
But how many instructions per second is supercomputers capable of? Well, we won’t actually know this number unless we have a device that is able to measure it in real time. This is probably something that is not going to be available within the next few years (unless someone develops a really fast desktop) but you could probably expect it to be a few tens of mega-intsimencies by then. It is very likely that future handheld devices will be ARM based which means that they will be able to do something similar to what the desktop does, but with a much lower overhead and a higher number of core processes. Which means that the number of questions we can reasonably answer about supercomputers will change dramatically over the next few years.
