High performance computing (HPC) is any technology solution that allows one to solve a problem faster than the single fastest CPU core they have access to. If it wasn’t fancy enough then HPC is the art of making supercomputers. The fastest supercomputer known to the world as on Jul 2018 is Summit in the US and the fastest supercomputer in India is Pratyush installed at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. The list is updated twice every year and is available at top500.org . The intended primary use of many top supercomputers are a closely guarded secret. However, today one could with certainty claim that most products and services we consume are either possible or made affordable through the use of supercomputers.
Agriculture
World population is estimated to touch 9.8 billion in 2050 and is predicted that 70% of this would be urban population. Feeding all of them poses an unique challenge never faced before. Supercomputers already play a pivotal role in modeling genetically enhanced plants increasing their yield and disease resistance. Supercomputers also helps simulate optimal plant growth conditions and reduce costs and time involved in field testing. Pest management, optimization of resource inputs with precision agriculture techniques and more data driven smart agriculture approaches will dominate the future of food production and all of them will be powered by supercomputers.
Banking Financial services and Insurance
Supercomputers play a key role in fraud detection and risk modelling in the new age BFSI sector preventing millions in losses. High frequency trading being the state of art are replacing humans in the trade floor and are powered by supercomputers. Cryptocurrencies are mined using very powerful and specialised hardware. However, the bitcoin network itself can be considered as a supercomputer and it would possibly be the first to achieve Exascale compute power. As a given, block chains will exist till a viable distributed network of computers remain unbeaten by a single largest supercomputer.
Pharmaceuticals
From Computer Aided Drug Design to personalized medicine, supercomputers help generate all feasible therapeutically important small molecules(drugs) into a virtual library, simulate their physiological effects, toxicological properties and tailor the treatment to the genomic finger print of a specific individual. Some of the pioneering techniques used in these domain are made possible only because of the technological advancements in High Performance Computing.
Climate and Weather modelling
The numerical simulations that forecast weather and climate are computationally intensive and require powerful supercomputers to produce reliable results. The applications of supercomputers in this domain has the most direct social and economic impact in my opinion. Tropical cyclone forecasting and tracking allows meteorologist to predict the formation and path of a cyclone. This helps local administration to take precautionary steps to prevent loss of life. Accurate weather and ocean models have made air travel safe and have saved millions of dollars in damage and insurance for the shipping industry. Urban flood modelling and air quality modelling tools influence planning and policy decisions in urban development and disaster management.
Physics
Supercomputers have been at the forefront of advancements in applied physics. For example, it takes thousands of simulations that use classical physics to get a new vehicle on the road. These simulations answer questions that improve efficiency, creates a quiet and comfortable cabin and makes the vehicle safer even when an actual vehicle was not manufactured even once. If CERN’s Large Hadron Collider created God Particle, then a supercomputer detected it. Nuclear explosions today are simulated through supercomputers dramatically reducing the need for physical testing. Computational Astrophysics uses powerful supercomputers to study the universe as we know it and further the theories like existence of dark matter and other anomalies that cannot be experimentally validated yet. From classical physics to high energy physics and galactic scale simulations, supercomputers are helping us discover answers to questions that cannot be deduced by other means in another million years.
In summary, supercomputers provide a venue for making economically feasible products, environmentally optimal solutions, services trusted and always available defining the internet as we know. High performance computing can be thought of as a tool that compresses time and supercomputers have made the future possible today.
All views expressed here are my own and do not represent the opinions of any entity whosoever with which I have been, am now or will be affiliated.
Very nicely written article.