 - A desktop supercomputer, also called a personal supercomputer, is a term that is used to describe any exceptionally powerful computer that can be placed at a single workstation. Whenever a radically improved microprocessor design or technology appears, the resulting product is often called a desktop supercomputer. Compared to the personal computers of 10 years ago, today's low-end machines can be called supercomputers. Personal computers expected to be in common use 10 years from now would, if made available today, seem like supercomputers to the average user.
The most common approach to desktop supercomputing is the combination of multiple microprocessors into a single machine. This is called multiprocessing, coprocessing, or parallel processing. In one method, numerous microprocessors are connected in a manner similar to the way the individual computers are connected in a local area network (LAN). This allows each processor to work on a different part of a large task. In some systems, multiple displays are used. A system released in 2004 contains 64 processing elements, and can function at 25 gigaFLOPS (25,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second).
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25 Nov 2004
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