Question: What is a supercomputer?

Sam Geen answered on 17 Jun 2013:

A supercomputer has special powers to fight crime, like x-ray vision or flying.

No, I’m joking. A supercomputer is just a very fast computer. Normally you build one by taking lots of normal computers like the ones you have at school or home, and linking them all together. You get supercomputers that have thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of these linked together. You have to write the programs to run on it in a way that they run on different machines at once. We do this by breaking up our galaxies we simulate into chunks, and telling the parts of the supercomputer to communicate between them what’s happening in the other chunks. Then it saves all the data on a big hard drive, with hundreds of terabytes or more.