A supercomputer is a machine that's I/O bound instead of CPU bound, at least as a first approximation.
You'll get lots of specs thrown at you like in mid 2013 a supercomputer means using X, Y, and Z technologies. But that is just a longer format version of the above.
A pessimist usually warps the definition to a machine that's primarily programmer limited rather than CPU or I/O limited, LOL.
Over the decades as parallelism has been popular its drifted more toward being financially limited more so than anything else, in the long run this is probably going to be the new definition, a overall system who's performance is solely limited economically. You might think thats all computers, not so, there's plenty which are inherently limited by architecture to low performance, or limited by programming to single core / single thread tasks.
The biggest bummer of supercomputers in the parallel era is no one is doing anything about latency. That's nice that your 2000 processor design with 20 deep pipelines eventually after enormous latency can really churn stuff out, but the olden days pursuit of low latency resulting in speed was pretty interesting technologically. Hilariously you'll even get noobs who don't even understand the difference between latency and speed or claim there isn't one.
You'll get lots of specs thrown at you like in mid 2013 a supercomputer means using X, Y, and Z technologies. But that is just a longer format version of the above.
A pessimist usually warps the definition to a machine that's primarily programmer limited rather than CPU or I/O limited, LOL.
Over the decades as parallelism has been popular its drifted more toward being financially limited more so than anything else, in the long run this is probably going to be the new definition, a overall system who's performance is solely limited economically. You might think thats all computers, not so, there's plenty which are inherently limited by architecture to low performance, or limited by programming to single core / single thread tasks.
The biggest bummer of supercomputers in the parallel era is no one is doing anything about latency. That's nice that your 2000 processor design with 20 deep pipelines eventually after enormous latency can really churn stuff out, but the olden days pursuit of low latency resulting in speed was pretty interesting technologically. Hilariously you'll even get noobs who don't even understand the difference between latency and speed or claim there isn't one.