GK Questions with Answers

General Knowledge

Supercomputers  – Measure of computer performance

Which is a more accurate measure of computer performance in supercomputers 

[A] Hz
[B] GB
[C] RAM
[D] FLOPs

Supercomputers 

  1. In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
  2. For such cases, it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.
  1. The computing power of today’s supercomputers is often measured in petaFLOPs (PFLOPs),
  2. PFLOPs – which represent billions or even trillions of operations per second.
  3. A petaFLOP is equivalent to 1015 FLOPs.
  4. In 2008, the IBM Roadrunner became the first supercomputer to break the petaFLOPS barrier with a peak performance of 1.105 petaFLOPS.

Current Affairs

  1. India will unveil its new 18 petaFLOP supercomputer for weather forecasting institutes later this year,
  2. The new supercomputer is expected to improve weather forecasts at the block level, help weather scientists give higher resolution ranges of the forecast, predict cyclones with more accuracy and better lead time (the difference between a phenomenon being forecast and actually occuring).
  3. “Presently, we give forecasts with a 12-kilometre resolution. The new supercomputer will improve it to six-kilometre resolution. Our aim is to achieve one-kilometre resolution forecasts,”