What makes a supercomputer so powerful? Here's how

The term "supercomputing" has a long history. It was first recorded around 1930 to refer to "statistical machines" at Columbia University .

The first computer generally regarded as a supercomputer is the CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and launched in 1964 .

Modern supercomputers synchronize data across hundreds of thousands to millions of CPU and GPU cores.

Supercomputers are at their best with workloads that cannot run time- or cost-effectively on smaller systems.

Weather forecasting and earth science simulations have scaled up beautifully to run on supercomputer-sized systems.

The advent of GPU compute in the mid-2010s significantly increased supercomputer performance in general.

Beowulf is a technology of clustering computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer.

Distributed computing delegates a part of its workload to each of the nodes in its network.

Modern supercomputers are literal orders of magnitude more efficient than computers of four decades past, but they consume more electricity anyway.

AI might eventually point the way to circuit optimizations and new approaches to computing that currently elude us.