A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of aerodynamics, of the early moments of the universe, and of nuclear weapons). They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.
The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2022, exascale supercomputers have existed which can perform over 10Â FLOPS. For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (10) to tens of teraFLOPS (10). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.