What is the definition of a supercomputer?

Answer 1

supercomputerA supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation (or both).

At any given time, there are usually a few well-publicized supercomputers that operate at extremely high speeds. The term is also sometimes applied to far slower (but still impressively fast) computers. Most supercomputers are really multiple computers that perform parallel processing. In general, there are two parallel processing approaches: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP).

Answer 2

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.

Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research.

He then took over the supercomputer market with his new designs, holding the top spot in supercomputing for five years (1985-1990). In the 1980s a large number of smaller competitors entered the market, in parallel to the creation of the minicomputer market a decade earlier, but many of these disappeared in the mid-1990s "supercomputer market crash". Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as Cray, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience. As of July 2009[update], the IBM Roadrunner, located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the fastest supercomputer in the world. The term supercomputer itself is rather fluid, and today's supercomputer tends to become tomorrow's ordinary computer. CDC's early machines were simply very fast scalar processors, some ten times the speed of the fastest machines offered by other companies. In the 1970s most supercomputers were dedicated to running a vector processor, and many of the newer players developed their own such processors at a lower price to enter the market. The early and mid-1980s saw machines with a modest number of vector processors working in parallel to become the standard. Typical numbers of processors were in the range of four to sixteen. In the later 1980s and 1990s, attention turned from vector processors to massive parallel processing systems with thousands of "ordinary" CPUs, some being off the shelf units and others being custom designs. Today, parallel designs are based on "off the shelf" server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Opteron, or Xeon, and most modern supercomputers are now highly-tuned computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

Answer 3

A supercomputer is a very large sized computer. These computers are used in NASA, railway, and in airports.

A supercomputer is any computer having at least 10 times the speed and memory of any other computer available in its time period. They are designed for use by those with unusually large and computationally intensive problems (and especially large budgets). The biggest users of supercomputers have been (in approximate order):

1. Nuclear weapons labs*** (always the biggest user, from the very beginning)
2. Government agencies doing lots of codebreaking (e.g. NSA)
3. Aircraft and Aerospace companies
4. Oil companies
5. Optical system design companies
6. Animation companies (3D animation films)
7. etc.

A railway or airport would have no use for one, standard COTS computers could handle their needs and be cheaper. NASA does use them for airflow modeling, etc.

Answer 4

The usual definition of a supercomputer has been a computer designed to be at least 10 times as fast and with at least 10 times the main memory of the fastest standard commercially available computer on the market at the same time. Usually supercomputers are designed to solve scientific and engineering types of problems, not business types of problems.

Answer 5

The fastest and most expensive computer you will find.

Answer 6

Any computer having at least 10 times the speed and at least 10 times the storage of the most powerful standard commercially available computer of the time period.