Supercomputers are often grouped together with the mainframes. But supercomputers are even more powerful (and expensive) than most mainframes. Although they are similar in basic design to the mainframes, they may use many processors at the same time and can process data faster than any other type of computer. Supercomputers are generally used by very large companies and research institutions to process complex mathematical calculations

A 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).

Published on Apr 30, 2014

How do engineers build today's supercomputers, and how are the world's fastest computers ranked? We visit the Texas Advanced Computing Center, home of one of the world's top supercomputing clusters, to learn about and how researchers tap into petaflops of processing power. We're talking about a system with 270 Terabytes of RAM and 14 Petabytes of storage!

Learn more about TACC's Stampede supercomputer here: https://www.tacc.utexas.edu/stampede/

Category
    Science & Technology 
License
    Standard YouTube License