A supercomputer is mainframe computer that has been optimized for speed and processing power. The most famous series of supercomputers were designed by the company founded and named after Seymour Cray. The Cray-1 was built in the 1976 and installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Supercomputers are used for extremely calculation-intensive tasks such simulating nuclear bomb detonations, aerodynamic flows, and global weather patterns. A supercomputer typically costs several million dollars.
Recently, some supercomputers have been constructed by connecting together large numbers of individual processing units (in some cases, these processing units are standard microcomputer hardware).
Please note: All of this talk of which computers are more powerful than others (i.e., mainframes are more powerful than minicomputers, which are more powerful than microcomputers) is relative for any particular moment in time. However, all classes of computers are becoming more powerful with time as technology improves. The microprocessor chip in a handheld calculator is more powerful than the ENIAC was, and your desktop computer has more processing power than the first supercomputers did.
