Question: What is it like programing super computers

Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

It’s basically like programming a normal computer. The only difference is that a supercomputer is made of lots of normal computers joined together with a big shared hard drive, and you have to write your programs so they communicate with each other. For example, in my work each computer processor in the supercomputer takes a chunk of what you’re simulating (a galaxy, or the universe, or a supernova), figured out what happens in that chunk, then tells the other processors what it finds out, updates its own chunk with neighbouring chunks, then it does this again until it’s finished. You also have to consider how you store and analyse a lot of data (I have ten terabytes of data at the moment!)

You also normally work on the command line – so typing commands into a window, rather than using icons like in Windows. This means you have to learn how to control a computer with text commands, which is annoying at first but then becomes really easy and powerful.