What is "supercomputer"

1966, from super- + computer.

n. (context computing English) Any computer that has a far greater processing power than others of its day; typically they use more than one core and are housed in large clean rooms with high air flow to permit cooling. Typical uses are weather forecasting, nuclear simulations and animations.

n. a mainframe computer that is one of the most powerful available at a given time

Supercomputer may refer to:

• Supercomputer, a computer that led the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction.
• "Supercomputer", a Main Villain Computer in an animated movie '' Code Lyoko
• "Super Computer", an episode of the Adult Swim animated television series, Aqua Teen Hunger Force
• Super Computer, a fictional TV sitcom in the universe of the TV show 30 Rock.
• Supercomputer, the thirty-ninth Choose Your Own Adventure book, written by Edward Packard.

A supercomputer is a computer with a high-level computational capacity compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). As of 2015, there are supercomputers which can perform up to quadrillions of FLOPS.

Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially, and for decades primarily, by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors were the norm.

As of June 2016 the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Sunway TaihuLight, with a Linpack benchmark of 93 PFLOPS, exceeding the previous record holder, Tianhe-2, by around 59 PFLOPS. It tops the rankings in the TOP500 supercomputer list. Sunway TaihuLight's emergence is also notable for its use of indigenous chips, and is the first Chinese computer to enter the TOP500 list without using hardware from the United States. As of June 2016, the Chinese, for the first time, had more computers (167) on the TOP500 list than the United States (165). However, U.S. built computers held ten of the top 20 positions.

Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). Throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.

Systems with massive numbers of processors generally take one of the two paths: in one approach (e.g., in distributed computing), hundreds or thousands of discrete computers (e.g., laptops) distributed across a network (e.g., the Internet) devote some or all of their time to solving a common problem; each individual computer (client) receives and completes many small tasks, reporting the results to a central server which integrates the task results from all the clients into the overall solution. In another approach, thousands of dedicated processors are placed in proximity to each other (e.g., in a computer cluster); this saves considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for the processors to work together (rather than on separate tasks), for example in mesh and hypercube architectures.

The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging trend; one can think of this as a small cluster (the multicore processor in a smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) that both depends upon and contributes to the cloud.