What is a Supercomputer?

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance in comparison to a

general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is typically tracked
through its floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). FLOPS a measure of
computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require
floating-point calculations, aka calculations that include very small and very
large real numbers and usually need fast processing times. It is a more accurate
measure than million instructions per second (MIPS).

Since 2017, we have supercomputers that can carry out over a hundred quadrillion
FLOPS, called petaFLOPS. It is also interesting to note that today, all of the
world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.