Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of contemporary processing capacity – particularly speed of calculation which can happen at speeds of nanoseconds. Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, made initially and, for decades, primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram. While the supercomputers of the 1970s used only a few processors, in the 1990s machines with thousands of processors began to appear and, by the end of the 20th century, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of "off-the-shelf" processors were the norm. As of November 2013, China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer is the fastest in the world at 33.86 petaFLOPS, or 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

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