What is a supercomputer?

No, it’s not a computer with a cape! 

But it does have superpowers! Imagine a huge team of computers, all working together to solve the same problem. Many hands make light work. This is the essence of  ‘supercomputing’—or ‘high performance computing’. It means processing massive amounts of information really, really fast!

Not your regular laptop

The very first computers processed data in a serial manner—which means they performed calculations one at a time. While today’s smartphones can perform trillions of operations per second, they’re still not able to solve really complex problems—like simulating the Earth’s climate or developing new molecules for novel drugs.

Supercomputers, however, can solve these problems by performing a gigantic number of calculations at the same time, or, in parallel.   

How fast?

Blazingly fast. 

Specialised software and data storage organises the information to facilitate parallel computing. The problem is split into lots of small pieces which are solved simultaneously.

For instance, asking our Perth supercomputer Bruce (which is 5 petaflops) to solve a problem is like asking millions of laptops to go to work at the same time.