Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer built to perform calculations at a scale far beyond that of an ordinary desktop or server, usually by linking thousands of processors and, increasingly, graphics processing units that work on parts of a problem at the same time. Performance is measured in floating-point operations per second, and the fastest systems have passed the exascale mark of a billion billion such operations each second. Governments, universities and companies use supercomputers for weather forecasting, climate research, drug discovery, nuclear simulations and training large artificial intelligence models. In finance they support risk modelling and simulations, and the term sometimes appears in crypto when a blockchain is described as a "world computer", although public blockchains are far slower than supercomputers. Future quantum computers work on different principles and are not simply faster supercomputers.