Is a Supercomputer the most powerful type of computer?

Answer 1

"Supercomputer" is a very vague name for a very powerful computer. If there were a more powerful type of computer than the ones you're thinking of, it would instantly be called a supercomputer.

Answer 2

Well first you have to look at what type of power do you want. There are different types of operating environments and therfore different requirements for "Powerful" I'll Break down a quick list of the most common real quick.

Consumer PC (Gaming rig)Right now pre-built dream systems are running what they have always ran: $5,000-10,000 these are high preformance gameing rigs capable of putting the current generation video game consoles to shame (XBOX-360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii)

and they would include (rough and quick)

-Current generation of multi-core processors (haven't checked in a couple of weeks but it was the phenom at 4 cores at the time)

-Motherboard that supports all the new tech 3 PCIe x16 True Slots

6 DIMM slots supporting the fastest current DDR3 (what are you guys up to now 1.5Ghz?)

-PCI-Express Sound Card 8.1 surround sound.

-8.1 Surround sound speakers

-3 Current Generation NVIDIA Video Cards (or 2 Double Slot Cards [for a total of four] and a phys x card (laugh I know)

and then all the mundane but just as important stuff (Case, Cooling, Power Supply, Multi-Layer Blu-Ray Burners ect)

But in reality once you move away from the "Home Computer" Computers become somewhat of an amazing thing for example

the Earth Simulator cost $400,000,000, and the 640 processor node supercomputer was benchmarked with Linpack as having 35.86 TFlop/s performance, that is raw number crunching so now were talking the difference of a super supped up Mustang to a Saturn v Rocket Engine,

but it gets better:

IBM's BlueGene/L machine is both the fastest and most expensive supercomputer ever built in the United States. It was built at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer is built from 64 racks of Blue Gene servers, each of which contains 1,024 700MHz dual-core PowerPC processors.

Specifications listed on LLNL's website about their BlueGene/L system

are as follows:

• 65,536 compute nodes, each targeted for 2.8 GFlop/s peak <
• Chip multiprocessor with 4MB L3 cache on chip
• High-bandwidth low-latency 3D torus and combining tree networks
• 32 terabytes of memory (that's RAM not hard drive space!!)
• High-performance kernel on compute nodes, Linux on I/O nodes
• Hardware support for Message Passing Interface collectives

BlueGene/L currently tops the TOP500 Supercomputers list with a Linpack performance benchmark of 280.6 TFlop/s.

So the Earth Simulator had a benchmark of 35.86 TFlop/s performance and cost 400,000,000

IBM sells a single 1,024 processor BlueGene rack for approximately $2,000,000. The BlueGene/L supercomputer was built by IBM for the DoE along with the ASCI Purple supercomputer that benchmarks at 63.39 TFlop/s as part of a $290,000,000 contract

So Japan Go Ripped off as IBM's freebee was faster than the earth simulator at half the price but still at the time (both months) they enjoyed the #1 spot as most powerful computer.