What is a supercomputer?

Question

What is a supercomputer? Please help me thanks :)

Answer 1

One not built by Microsoft because to be super it would have to work properly.

Answer 2

"Supercomputers" are the fastest, biggest, baddest computers around.  They are typically used by the NSA, Weather forecasters, researchers in computational fluid dynamics (modeling airflow for planes or waterflow for boats and submarines), research scientists, etc.

Sometimes these supercomputers are a single computer.  Sometimes these supercomputers are large arrays, clusters, or grids of computers all being applied to the same task at once.  I recently had 1400 computers working on one of my tasks for 24 hours.

There is no fixed definition of a supercomputer.  A $500 PC today has more memory, more storage, and more computational horsepower than a supercomputer of the 1980's.  In fact, a cellphone or iPhone may have more compute power than a supercomputer from the 1980's.