Historical developmentДЄlthough early supercomputers were built by various companies, one individual, Seymour Cray, really defined the product almost from the start. In particular, the 5th through 10th fastest Chinese supercomputers in 2007 were owned by a company with online rights in China to the electronic game World of Warcraft, which sometimes had more than a million people playing together in the same gaming world. As the cost of supercomputers declined, their use spread to the world of online gaming. Supercomputers have become an indispensable tool in weather forecasting: predictions are now based on numerical models. In addition, supercomputers have found wide application in areas involving engineering or scientific research, as, for example, in studies of the structure of subatomic particles and of the origin and nature of the universe. Today they are also routinely employed by the aerospace, petroleum, and automotive industries. Supercomputers were originally used in applications related to national security, including nuclear weapons design and cryptography. For example, a typical supercomputer can multiply a list of hourly wage rates for a group of factory workers by a list of hours worked by members of that group to produce a list of dollars earned by each worker in roughly the same time that it takes a regular computer to calculate the amount earned by just one worker. Still another distinguishing characteristic of supercomputers is their use of vector arithmetic-i.e., they are able to operate on pairs of lists of numbers rather than on mere pairs of numbers. Hack into this quiz and let some technology tally your score and reveal the contents to you. Therefore, most supercomputers have a very large storage capacity, as well as a very fast input/output capability.Д¬omputers host websites composed of HTML and send text messages as simple as.LOL. Rapid retrieval of stored data and instructions is required to support the extremely high computational speed of CPUs. This limit has almost been reached, owing to miniaturization of circuit components, dramatic reduction in the length of wires connecting circuit boards, and innovation in cooling techniques (e.g., in various supercomputer systems, processor and memory circuits are immersed in a cryogenic fluid to achieve the low temperatures at which they operate fastest). Electronic signals cannot travel faster than the speed of light, which thus constitutes a fundamental speed limit for signal transmission and circuit switching. The use of several CPUs to achieve high computational rates is necessitated by the physical limits of circuit technology. Unlike conventional computers, they usually have more than one CPU (central processing unit), which contains circuits for interpreting program instructions and executing arithmetic and logic operations in proper sequence. Supercomputers have certain distinguishing features.

As the cost of supercomputing declined in the 1990s, more businesses began to use supercomputers for market research and other business-related models. Common applications for supercomputers include testing mathematical models for complex physical phenomena or designs, such as climate and weather, evolution of the cosmos, nuclear weapons and reactors, new chemical compounds (especially for pharmaceutical purposes), and cryptology.

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

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