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Kraken was operated by the University of Tennessee and was the most powerful computer in the world managed by academia at the time. It was housed in the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kraken was decommissioned on April 30, 2014.

The two broad categories of supercomputers: general purpose supercomputers and special purpose supercomputers.Mar 31, 2020

• Summary: Difference Between Mainframe Computer and Supercomputer is that A mainframe is a large, expensive, powerful computer that can handle hundreds or thousands of connected users simultaneously. Mainframes store huge amounts of data, instructions, and information.

• What tasks do supercomputers perform? Aerodynamic research Climate research Cryptanalysis (code-breaking) Gas and oil exploration Molecular modeling Nuclear fusion and weapon research Quantum mechanics Rendering 3D graphics Weather forecasting

• The term "super computer" is considered the most powerful computers in performance and processing. Supercomputers are capable to solve immense mathematical calculations, scientific problems and hence it is called number crunchers. They are difficult to design and need teamwork research and development.

• However, supercomputers are still used for a wide range of tasks. In the United States, a supercomputer is used to protect nuclear weapons, and some suspect that government supercomputers are used to break difficult cryptography problems.Today, supercomputers are often used for scientific pursuits.

Examples of special-purpose supercomputers include Belle, Deep Blue, and Hydra for playing chess, Gravity Pipe for astrophysics, MDGRAPE-3 for protein structure prediction and molecular dynamics, and Deep Crack for breaking the DES cipher.

Types of Supercomputers

The two broad categories of supercomputers: general purpose supercomputers and special purpose supercomputers. General purpose supercomputers can be further divided into three subcategories: vector processing supercomputers, tightly connected cluster computers, and commodity computers.Mar 31, 2020

Today, there are at least 500 supercomputers in the world that can exceed a petaflop, or one billion flops, according to the TOP500 list drawn up by experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee (USA).Sep 30, 2019

What is a supercomputer? ... A supercomputer is not simply a fast or very large computer: it works in an entirely different way, typically using parallel processing instead of the serial processing that an ordinary computer uses. Instead of doing one thing at a time, it does many things at once.Jul 23, 2021

Software is a set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks. It is the opposite of hardware, which describes the physical aspects of a computer. Software is a generic term used to refer to applications, scripts and programs that run on a device.

Supercomputer. Supercomputer, any of a class of extremely powerful computers. The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems available at any given time. Such computers have been used primarily for scientific and engineering work requiring exceedingly high-speed computations.

Although the latest computer games can be complex, they rely more on graphics processing on a single computer running an operating system like Microsoft Windows. So, for computer gaming, a gaming computer would outperform a supercomputer.

They have evolved from grid to cluster system of massively parallel computing. Cluster system computing means that machine uses multiple processors in one system instead of arrays of separate computers in a network. These computers are most massive concerning size. A most powerful supercomputer can occupy few feet to hundreds of feet.

As of 2016, the largest supercomputer is the Sunway TaihuLight in China. It consists of 40,960 RISC processors, each with 256 cores, totaling 10,649,600 cores.