Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer whose performance is far higher than that of a general-purpose machine, measured in floating-point operations per second and used for computational science tasks such as weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling, and cryptanalysis. In 1960 UNIVAC built the Livermore Atomic Research Computer, today considered among the first supercomputers, and in 1961 IBM completed the IBM 7030 Stretch for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Seymour Cray's CDC 6600, finished in 1964, became the fastest computer in the world and defined the supercomputing market that followed. Every one of the world's five hundred fastest supercomputers has run on Linux-based systems since November 2017, and since 2022 the fastest machines have exceeded a billion billion floating-point operations per second.