Any of a class of extremely powerful
The term is commonly applied to the fastest high-performance systems available at a given time; current personal computers are more powerful than the supercomputers of just a few years ago. Supercomputers are used primarily for scientific and engineering work. Unlike conventional computers, they usually have more than one {{link=CPU">CPU , often functioning in parallel (simultaneously); even higher-performance supercomputers are now being developed through use of massively parallel processing, incorporating thousands of individual processors. Supercomputers have huge storage capacity and very fast input/output capability, and can operate in parallel on corresponding elements of arrays of numbers rather than on one pair of elements at a time.