supercomputer, Any of a class of extremely powerful digital computers. The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems available at a given time. Supercomputers are often used for scientific and engineering work. Early supercomputers usually had more than one CPU, often functioning in parallel (simultaneously). Some supercomputers also used special-purpose, expensive processors. Later, large arrays of, in some cases, many thousands of commodity processors operating in parallel became common. Supercomputers have huge storage capacity and very fast input/output capability, and they can operate in parallel on corresponding elements of arrays of numbers rather than on one pair of elements at a time.
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