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Cray-1 ‘self-portrait’
Credit: Cray Research Inc.
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There has never been – and probably never will be – a limit to how much computing power can be used. Whatever the current technology, there are always users who require and can pay for the highest possible computer performance. “Supercomputers” are simply those computers that lead the world in terms of processing capacity or speed of calculation at their time of introduction. They are most often used for repetitive calculation tasks such as forecasting, modeling and simulations of physical systems. Seymour Cray is a legendary designer responsible for many of the world’s fastest computers from the 1960s to the 1980s. Here you will see examples of various historical supercomputers, most of which are slower than today’s desktop computers.
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