Analogue Computer Extra Quality
Just have a look at the latest Top500-list of high-performance computers. Currently, the most powerful supercomputer is the Sunway TaihuLight at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. This behemoth delivers a whopping 93 petaflops (one petaflop equals a quadrillion floating point operations per second), which is really unfathomable.
analogue computer
What causes this difference? First of all, the brain is a specialized computer, so to speak, while systems like TaihuLight and TSUBAME3.0 are much more general-purpose machines, capable of tackling a wide variety of problems.
Clearly analog computing holds great promise for the future. One of the main problems to tackle will be that programming analog computers differs completely from everything students learn in university today.
In analog computers there are no algorithms, no loops, nothing as they know it. Instead there are a couple of basic, yet powerful computing elements that have to be interconnected cleverly in order to set up an electronic analog of some mathematically described problem.
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An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities (analog signals) to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically and by discrete values of both time and amplitude (digital signals).
Analog computers can have a very wide range of complexity. Slide rules and nomograms are the simplest, while naval gunfire control computers and large hybrid digital/analog computers were among the most complicated.[1] Complex mechanisms for process control and protective relays used analog computation to perform control and protective functions.
Analog computers were widely used in scientific and industrial applications even after the advent of digital computers, because at the time they were typically much faster, but they started to become obsolete as early as the 1950s and 1960s, although they remained in use in some specific applications, such as aircraft flight simulators, the flight computer in aircraft, and for teaching control systems in universities. Perhaps the most relatable example of analog computers are mechanical watches where the continuous and periodic rotation of interlinked gears drives the seconds, minutes and hours needles in the clock. More complex applications, such as aircraft flight simulators and synthetic-aperture radar, remained the domain of analog computing (and hybrid computing) well into the 1980s, since digital computers were insufficient for the task.[2]
This is a list of examples of early computation devices considered precursors of the modern computers. Some of them may even have been dubbed 'computers' by the press, though they may fail to fit modern definitions.
The differential analyser, a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. In 1876 James Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators. A number of similar systems followed, notably those of the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, who built several machines for solving real and complex roots of polynomials; and Michelson and Stratton, whose Harmonic Analyser performed Fourier analysis, but using an array of 80 springs rather than Kelvin integrators. This work led to the mathematical understanding of the Gibbs phenomenon of overshoot in Fourier representation near discontinuities.[11] In a differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in the 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers.
The Dumaresq was a mechanical calculating device invented around 1902 by Lieutenant John Dumaresq of the Royal Navy. It was an analog computer that related vital variables of the fire control problem to the movement of one's own ship and that of a target ship. It was often used with other devices, such as a Vickers range clock to generate range and deflection data so the gun sights of the ship could be continuously set. A number of versions of the Dumaresq were produced of increasing complexity as development proceeded.
By 1912, Arthur Pollen had developed an electrically driven mechanical analog computer for fire-control systems, based on the differential analyser. It was used by the Imperial Russian Navy in World War I.[citation needed][12]
World War II era gun directors, gun data computers, and bomb sights used mechanical analog computers. In 1942 Helmut Hölzer built a fully electronic analog computer at Peenemünde Army Research Center[14][15][16] as an embedded control system (mixing device) to calculate V-2 rocket trajectories from the accelerations and orientations (measured by gyroscopes) and to stabilize and guide the missile.[17][18] Mechanical analog computers were very important in gun fire control in World War II, the Korean War and well past the Vietnam War; they were made in significant numbers.
The FERMIAC was an analog computer invented by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1947 to aid in his studies of neutron transport.[19] Project Cyclone was an analog computer developed by Reeves in 1950 for the analysis and design of dynamic systems.[20] Project Typhoon was an analog computer developed by RCA in 1952. It consisted of over 4,000 electron tubes and used 100 dials and 6,000 plug-in connectors to program.[21] The MONIAC Computer was a hydraulic analogy of a national economy first unveiled in 1949.[22]
Analog computer designs were published in electronics magazines. One example is the PEAC (Practical Electronics analogue computer), published in Practical Electronics in the January 1968 edition.[27] Another more modern hybrid computer design was published in Everyday Practical Electronics in 2002.[28] An example described in the EPE hybrid computer was the flight of a VTOL aircraft such as the Harrier jump jet.[28] The altitude and speed of the aircraft were calculated by the analog part of the computer and sent to a PC via a digital microprocessor and displayed on the PC screen.
The electronic circuit can also be made to run faster or slower than the physical system being simulated. Experienced users of electronic analog computers said that they offered a comparatively intimate control and understanding of the problem, relative to digital simulations.
The precision of the analog computer readout was limited chiefly by the precision of the readout equipment used, generally three or four significant figures. (Modern digital simulations are much better in this area. Digital arbitrary-precision arithmetic can provide any desired degree of precision.) However, in most cases the precision of an analog computer is absolutely sufficient given the uncertainty of the model characteristics and its technical parameters.
Many small computers dedicated to specific computations are still part of industrial regulation equipment, but from the 1950s to the 1970s, general-purpose analog computers were the only systems fast enough for real time simulation of dynamic systems, especially in the aircraft, military and aerospace field.
Although the basic technology for analog computers is usually operational amplifiers (also called "continuous current amplifiers" because they have no low frequency limitation), in the 1960s an attempt was made in the French ANALAC computer to use an alternative technology: medium frequency carrier and non dissipative reversible circuits.
In the early 1970s, analog computer manufacturers tried to tie together their analog computer with a digital computer to get the advantages of the two techniques. In such systems, the digital computer controlled the analog computer, providing initial set-up, initiating multiple analog runs, and automatically feeding and collecting data. The digital computer may also participate to the calculation itself using analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters.
The largest manufacturer of hybrid computers was Electronics Associates. Their hybrid computer model 8900 was made of a digital computer and one or more analog consoles. These systems were mainly dedicated to large projects such as the Apollo program and Space Shuttle at NASA, or Ariane in Europe, especially during the integration step where at the beginning everything is simulated, and progressively real components replace their simulated part.[30]
After 1980, purely digital computers progressed more and more rapidly and were fast enough to compete with analog computers.One key to the speed of analog computers was their fully parallel computation, but this was also a limitation. The more equations required for a problem, the more analog components were needed, even when the problem wasn't time critical. "Programming" a problem meant interconnecting the analog operators; even with a removable wiring panel this was not very versatile. Today there are no more big hybrid computers, but only hybrid components.[citation needed]
Most practical mechanical analog computers of any significant complexity used rotating shafts to carry variables from one mechanism to another. Cables and pulleys were used in a Fourier synthesizer, a tide-predicting machine, which summed the individual harmonic components. Another category, not nearly as well known, used rotating shafts only for input and output, with precision racks and pinions. The racks were connected to linkages that performed the computation. At least one U.S. Naval sonar fire control computer of the later 1950s, made by Librascope, was of this type, as was the principal computer in the Mk. 56 Gun Fire Control System. 041b061a72