The first thing you might think of when you think of a supercomputer are those names.

Cray, Aurora, Deep Blue, Pangea Frontier.

They're named after mountains and deserts and oceans.

They're poetic, mysterious, impenetrable, even if from the outside they don't look like much at all.

It's lots of black cabinets with lots of LEDs flashing.

Supercomputers are big, they're noisy, they use up more energy than a small town, but they

might just help us find the answer to some of the biggest problems.

What I could see happening in the future is like personalised medicine drug discovery on individuals.

You know, one thing that's very interesting is what's called space weather.

We're doing things now which would have been considered inconceivable even just two or three

years ago.

In today's episode, we go down the supercomputing rabbit hole to find out what

makes these machines so powerful, how machine learning is pushing the boundaries of science and tech,

and why organisations might need high-performance computing sooner than they might think. All that and

much more. I'm Michael Bird, and this is Technology Untangled. Supercomputing

and high performance computing or HPC are one and the same. But you hear HPC being used

more and more these days. You see, there's a growing call for the democratisation of high

performance computing. After all, I'm a growing call for the democratisation of high-performance computing.

After all, I'm sure you're saying to yourself, surely a supercomputer is just the best computer

ever, and don't we all deserve the best? The answers to that question are sort of and yes,

but to understand exactly what supercomputers are good for, we need to

understand where they came from.

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