What is a “super computer” and what can it do?
In: Technology
Supercomputers are special-purpose computers that link together higher-end components from typical computers using specialized hardware to achieve state-of-the-art processing power.
Many supercomputers use hundreds of thousands of individual processors working together to coordinate and solve some problem. But that alone does not make a supercomputer–for example, Google’s MapReduce uses large amounts of commodity-class machines to perform distributed and parallel computation. Supercomputers also generally have extremely fast memory, so the thousands of processors can work together on the same problem while sharing (mostly) the same memory. This is facilitated by extremely fast networking hardware called the “interlink:” high-end supercomputers make it so that talking to another machine is almost as fast (or at least much closer to the speed) of local RAM.
In practice, different supercomputers are organized in different ways to optimize for different kinds of workloads they handle. You can read more on wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer_architecture)
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