What Is Supercomputer?

Supercomputers are the Ferrari of computers. They're powerful, fast and pretty darn expensive. Supercomputers are made up of thousands of processors that work together to perform billions and trillions of calculations per second. These machines can crunch through data at a rate that would take a regular computer year, and they're used for everything from weather forecasting to simulating nuclear experiments. Cray developed the first supercomputer. Since then, companies like Intel and IBM have been competing to develop better hardware and software for supercomputers, which have gotten more powerful as time goes on. Supercomputers are like standard computers, only more extensive and more powerful. Supercomputers solve problems that require massive computing power, such as global climate modeling and nuclear weapons design. Supercomputers house thousands of processors—mainly CPUs, but sometimes GPUs or FPGAs—that work in parallel to solve a problem. Whereas a standard computer might have one core (or processor), a supercomputer might have thousands. In addition to having many substances, supercomputers also have additional hardware designed to improve performance. This can include things like high-bandwidth interconnects that allow the processors to communicate faster than they would over an ordinary motherboard or bus connection. If you're looking for the world's fastest supercomputer, you can stop looking now. It's called IBM Sequoia, and it just set a new record: 16,000 trillion calculations per second. That's enough to make even the most impressive calculator blush. According to IBM, that speed is "the equivalent of 1,000 laptops working in parallel over 3 million years." Of course, these days, it's not just about how fast your computer can calculate—it's also about how much energy it takes to do so. And Sequoia uses so little power that you could run it on a car battery while driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour!