supercomputer
Pluralsupercomputers
- 1A computer with processing power far greater than that of other machines from the same generation.
Like splitting a huge task among thousands of workers instead of one person, so it finishes far faster.
The lab installed a supercomputer to model how proteins fold.
National labs maintain supercomputers capable of trillions of operations per second.
Note
Its meaning is relative by design: a supercomputer is measured against its own generation, so yesterday's champion eventually becomes an ordinary machine. Richard Preston, writing in The New Yorker in 1992, already called gigaflop supercomputers "almost useless" beside a hoped-for teraflop machine. Speed is usually stated in flops (floating-point operations per second), and the prefixes giga- and tera- trace the rising bar.
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Origin
Formed from the prefix "super-" combined with "computer."