How do supercomputers work? Like I assume nasa and big govt have is it like a pc where you can play the best games best specs etc ?
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The original supercomputers, in the 1970s and ’80s, were really just super fast normal computers. They used special CPUs, built with more exotic/power-consuming transistor technology, and had special hand wiring tuned to the speed of light to make sure everything arrived at the right time for everything to work.
They did also have unusually large amounts of, and fast, memory and storage for the time – including SSDs aka “RAM disks” which are a commodity thing now.
There’s not too much different these days in terms of immediate RAM and secondary storage. They still have a lot of that. What’s different now vs. the classic Crays is they’re built with commodity CPUs/GPUs just with VAST numbers of them, in the hundreds of thousands, instead of having fewer “super” CPUs.
They hit a wall in terms of making individual pieces of hardware faster and transferred the effort into the software managing these large numbers of smaller, slower machines. Those individual “nodes” are probably no faster than your home PC, they’re just coordinated very cleverly.
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