What is the difference between super computer and mainframe computer?

Answer 1

Supercomputers have multiple processing units. Making its speedunimaginably fast. It can even run a whole virtual world updating every giga-second.

A mainframe computer is similar only it is more slower and can run larger applications. Usually to huge amounts of data such as a census for every single house hold in the US. Otherwise, there is no difference.

Answer 2

http://www.ttwin.com/blog/index.php/supercomputers-mainframes-minicomputers-microcomputers

I hope you could understand this as it elaborates by figures

http://koolkshetra.roxaa.com/2013/03/24/types-of-computers/

Answer 3

The great difference between super computer and mainframe is that

The supercomputer is much concerning with calculating one data in a very high speed while mainframe deals much with storing of large amount of data There fore we can say the the supercomputer is concered much with speed while mainframe is concerned with computing a large amount of datas

Answer 4

Supercomputers have multiple processing units. Making its speed unimaginably fast. It can even run a whole virtual world updating every giga-second.

A mainframe computer is similar only it is more slower and can run larger applications. Usually to huge amounts of data such as a census for every single house hold in the US. Otherwise, there is no difference.

Not entirely correct, the only difference between supercomputers and other computers (mainframe or not) is that supercomputers must be at least 10 times the speed and 10 times the data storage capacity of any ordinary computer in the same time period.

Multiple processors are in no way required, they just happen to be the most popular way of achieving that goal of speed and storage capacity at this time. In fact through the 1970s the top supercomputers were usually extremely fast uniprocessors, like the CDC 6600 & Cray-1. Also many mainframe, desktops, and laptops are multiprocessors now. What do you think multicore microprocessor means? A quadcore microprocessor is a single chip with four independent CPUs on it, but its not a supercomputer.

Note: a giga-second is 31.7 years. If you could keep it running that long nonstop without failure, even a very slow computer could run your virtual world simulation... you just might no longer be interested in it by the time you got the results. You might not even be around to see the results.

Answer 5

Mainframe:

Mainframes are powerful computers that are used mostly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.

Super:

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s and were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), which 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".