Supercomputers

A supercomputer is a very large computer or set of processors that can be used to calculate floating operations, the performance of a supercomputer is measured in FLOPS (Floating Point operations per second). Modern supercomputers can calculate quadrillions of FLOPS.

Supercomputers were introduced in the 60's and involved using a few processor all linked to calculate numbers, this gradually evolved to be a few hundred processors to where it is now where tens of thousands of processors are used to calculate quadrillions flops. A supercomputer can therefore be used for multiprocessing. The fastest Supercomputer in the world currently is owned by the Chinese, it is called Tianhe-2.