Supercomputers

Supercomputers are the most powerful class of computers, designed to perform extremely large numbers of calculations to solve complex scientific, engineering, and data-analysis problems. They achieve performance measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), often reaching into the petascale (10^15) and exascale (10^18) ranges. Most modern systems use massively parallel architectures that combine thousands to millions of processing elements, typically CPUs supplemented with many GPUs or specialized accelerators. Performance depends on both raw compute and the efficiency of the interconnect that links processors, memory, and accelerators.

Programs run on supercomputers are written to exploit parallelism, distributing work across processors and using high-bandwidth, low-latency networks. Benchmarks such as High-Performance Linpack (HPL) are used to rate systems, with lists like TOP500 tracking the fastest machines. Software ecosystems include optimized linear algebra libraries, MPI-based communication, and accelerator-aware compilers.

Historical milestones include the CDC 6600 in the 1960s, Cray-1, and the vectorized Cray systems; the 2000s saw petascale systems, followed by exascale systems in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Notable examples include Japan's Fugaku, the United States' Frontier and Aurora systems, and China's Tianhe series. These machines have enabled simulations of climate systems, turbulence, materials science, fusion research, genomics, and large-scale AI workloads.

Power consumption is a major consideration, with modern installations requiring sophisticated cooling and energy management. As hardware evolves, software efficiency and energy-aware computing designs accompany the growth of parallelism, aiming to deliver higher performance without proportional energy use.