Fact: technology in your smartphone is hundred times more powerful than what NASA used for the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. In just 50 years, human imagination and scientific temper has moved computing to a whole new level. The applications of digital technologies in today are having a distinct impact on almost every moment of our existence and daily routine. 

Recent examples:  

• Groundbreaking advancements in High Performance Computing (HPC) are being used for weather forecasting, running simulations and assisting in scientific research. A recent announcement introduced the Leonardo HPC system, currently the world’s fourth most powerful supercomputer, which will be able to perform at over 240 petaflops. With one petaflop being the computing speed equal to one quadrillion floating point operations per second, one can only imagine the computing power and limitless applications of a supercomputer this powerful 
• Also recently, NVIDIA and Microsoft teamed up to build what they are calling one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Its USP – it can be used to research and accelerate advances in generative AI and will be hosted on the Azure cloud. It is also scalable, takes up less power and is super energy efficient 

Data, the many petabytes of it that will flow from diverse devices in industrial plants across the world, and the supercomputing to power this data is at the heart of the current industrial revolution. Data capacity and computing speeds are critical to drive in-memory ERPs, Industrial IoT, and integration with smart sensing – all key success factors for the industrial transformation that is in its nascent stages. 

A typical industrial set-up has thousands of data generators – tens or even hundreds of thousands in large manufacturing enterprises. All of these churning out valuable data on asset performance every second. Data that can be used to run diverse processes and analytics. Supercomputing will be the bedrock of the ability to capture and store real-time data so analytics can be run on them for predictive insights on optimization. This will help meet the industrial world meet its long-standing dream of coming close to a productivity paradigm. 

With frequent breakthroughs in supercomputing technologies, we are racing towards an era of unimaginable innovation. Supercomputing has now started supporting more enterprise use cases, and it’s all driven by AI and Machine Learning.