In today’s world, manufacturers are constantly trying to make computers smaller and more powerful. However, when computers were first invented, size was not a consideration at all. In fact, the first fully functional digital computer called the ENIAC weighed almost 50,000 kilogrammes and took nearly three years to build. The ENIAC was very large but not very powerful when compared to computers today. By comparison, an average cell phone today is about a thousand times more powerful than the ENIAC was. Today, some supercomputers are still being built for processing power with no consideration of size. Examples of such supercomputers are the “Sunway TaihuLight” supercomputer in China and the “Summit” in America. The Summit weighs more than 300,000 kilogrammes. Supercomputers generate a lot of heat and need to have well designed cooling systems to avoid overheating. The Summit has a water-based cooling system that pumps 4,000 gallons of water through it per minute. These supercomputers allow researchers to run very complicated algorithms on very large sets of data in a shorter amount of time with a high degree of accuracy. Supercomputers can be used for various purposes like breaking encryption codes, doing calculations in the field of astrophysics or even playing chess.
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