What Is Supercomputer?

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!@retry56A supercomputer is a very very high end server. Perhaps I should add another "very" into my last sentence. Unlike your computer or mine, which has a single processor with perhaps two or four cores working together to deliver the computing power, supercomputers have thousands processors. The peripherals (monitor, input devices etc) connected to a computer do not really determine whether a computing device is a supercomputer because they are essentially about computational power and not about capabilities.The biggest and the baddest that I've had the good fortune to see about three years ago was a digital library setup that consisted of about a dozen storage devices with about a terabyte of disk space each connected to a single server that had four processors and 8GB of RAM. It was a high-end server but by no means a supercomputer. Back then, it was a beast but you can get a desktop computer to come close, if not match the performance. Think of a desktop with an Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, 4x 1TB disk drives with a few more connected through the USB 3.0 interfaces.A problem with maintaining a supercomputer is dealing with the heat dissipation and energy consumption. If you did manage to work that out, you would have the issue of splitting up a job into thousands of threads that could work in parallel.