The fastest computer currently available. Supercomputers are typically used for simulations in petroleum exploration and production, structural analysis, computational fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry, electronic design, nuclear energy research and meteorology.
From Two Million to Two Quintillion
In 1964, executing two million instructions per second (2 MIPS), Control Data's CDC 6600 is considered the first supercomputer. Years ago, it took a supercomputer to perform real-time animation, but that changed as desktop computers became more powerful.
Today, supercomputers can have millions of processing cores, and their floating point calculations are measured in the quadrillions and quintillions (see
petaFLOPS and
exaFLOPS). In 2026, China's LineShine supercomputer delivered 2.198 quintillion floating point operations per second (2.198 exaflops). See
space/time,
Golem Network,
supercomputer sites and
grid computing.
Supercomputers vs. Quantum Computers
Supercomputers may be the fastest but they employ nearly the same architecture as a desktop computer. For certain optimization problems, quantum computers can be faster than supercomputers by orders of magnitude. See
quantum computing,
quantum supremacy and
quantum AI.