A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.
The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division is located at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California. It has been the major supercomputing and modeling and simulation resource for NASA missions in aerodynamics, space exploration, studies in weather patterns and ocean currents, and space shuttle and aircraft design and development for almost forty years.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
The US National Center for Atmospheric Research is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NCAR has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Studies include meteorology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, solar-terrestrial interactions, environmental and societal impacts.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high-performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development, and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is high-performance computing (supercomputer) .National User Facility is operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. The mission is to establish a computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems which can be used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research with energy efficiency, storage, generation and Earth systems science, understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the Universe. The largest research areas are High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Perlmutter, which debuted in 2021 and ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers.
Roadrunner was a supercomputer built by IBM for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. The US$100-million Roadrunner was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. It achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25, 2008, to become the world's first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
The Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), also called Madrid Supercomputing and Visualization Center, depends on the computer science faculty of the Technical University of Madrid. This center houses Magerit, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Spain. This center is a member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network, the Spanish e-Science Network and the Madrid Laboratories and Infraestructures Network.
Pleiades is a petascale supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Field near Mountain View, California. It is maintained by NASA and partners Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
SuperMUC was a supercomputer of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. It was housed in the LRZ's data centre in Garching near Munich. It was decommissioned in January 2020, having been superseded by the more powerful SuperMUC-NG.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Mira is a retired petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. As of November 2017, it is listed on TOP500 as the 11th fastest supercomputer in the world, while it debuted June 2012 in 3rd place. It has a performance of 8.59 petaflops (LINPACK) and consumes 3.9 MW. The supercomputer was constructed by IBM for Argonne National Laboratory's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility with the support of the United States Department of Energy, and partially funded by the National Science Foundation. Mira was used for scientific research, including studies in the fields of material science, climatology, seismology, and computational chemistry. The supercomputer was used initially for sixteen projects selected by the Department of Energy.
The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a high-performance computing (HPC) and data archival facility located in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that provides advanced computing services to researchers in the Earth system sciences.
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
The Cheyenne supercomputer at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming operated for seven years as one of the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computers from 2017 to 2024. Ranked in November 2016 as the 20th most powerful computer in the world and November 2023 as 160th by Top500, the 5.34-petaflops system is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing performed by NCAR’s previous supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient than Yellowstone, with a peak computation rate of more than 3 billion calculations per second for every watt of energy consumed.
