Airplanes not necessarily use supercomputers but, supercomputers are used to design airplanes. One of the many uses of supercomputers is to model how wind and turbulence affect an airplane. Supercomputers are also used in advanced flight simulators.
Usually a customized version of Linux.
That depends on the supercomputer.
There are supercomputers in Pakistan. There are some in educational institutes like NUST, there are also supercomputers present within Atomic Energy and related research institutes. Throughout the nuclear history of Pakistan, we have been using supercomputers. Also, oil and gas and geological survey companies have also been using these supercomputers. Now the supercomputer of yesteryears is less powerful than alot of desktop computers of today. I guess with the advent of parallel processing, anyone can build with supercomputers.
Blue gene technology is a type of project designed to construct several supercomputers running in speeds of PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range and at nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS). It is used in supercomputers.
The average cost of supercomputers typically ranges from 500 million to 1 billion.
They are fast.
Today supercomputers are the fastest computers available and are used by military and defense research agencies, universities, independent research centers and some engineering corporations. Major vendors of these computers include IBM and HP.
Supercomputers can cost anywhere from a few million to hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on their capabilities and specifications.
Cray
IBM
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