Supercomputer is a computer with high-speed processing and large memory capacity. It has applications in research areas that large amount of processing is required, such as military research, science, chemistry and medicine. Supercomputers are used for very complex calculations and intensive tasks, such as quantum physics involving problems, mechanical, weather, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polímeos and crystals) and physical simulations, as a simulation airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of weapons nuclearese research on nuclear fusion.
The first supercomputers were created in the 1960s by Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray founded his own company, Cray Research in 1970 and dominated the market for supercomputing for 25 years (1965-1990).
In the 70s the University of Illinois set up in conjunction with the Burroughs Corporation ILLIAC IV, a supercomputer made famous by the dimensions.
In the early 80s, it came the Cray-XMP which reached 1 gigaflop a breakthrough and both times.
Currently all supercomputers are produced with components of computers we use at home with the difference of having thousands gave components working as one. Instead of using just one HD IDE or SATA hard drives they use hundreds of working together as a huge HD enabling the read / simultaneous recording of information coming at very high data transfer rates, a very similar system with RAID technology.
These computers are divided and organized into various modules that are called nodes, each node consists of one to four processors, a certain amount of RAM and cache. All nodes are interconnected by a network interface making work together as a single system with a processing thousands of times greater than our computers.
Science fiction addressed the subject in a novel called "Colossus".
Today, supercomputers are manufactured by companies such as Supermicro, NEC, SUN (this was bought by Oracleem 2010), IBM, HP, Apple Inc., and etc. The updated list of the 500 most power computer systems
