Computer Types According to Capability Supercomputers

A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest
operational rate for computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and
engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of
computation (or both). At any given time, there are usually a few well-publicized
supercomputers that operate at the very latest and always incredible speeds.
Perhaps the best-known builder of supercomputers has been Cray Research, now a part
of Silicon Graphics. Some supercomputers are at "supercomputer center," usually
university research centers, some of which, in the United States, are interconnected on
an Internet backbone (A backbone is a larger transmission line that carries data gathered
from smaller lines that interconnect with it) known as vBNS or NSFNet.
At the high end of supercomputing are computers like IBM's "Blue Pacific," announced
on October 29, 1998. Built in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
operations per second), 15,000 times faster than the average personal computer. It
consists of 5,800 processors containing a total of 2.6 trillion bytes of memory and
interconnected with five miles of cable.