With our system, maybe as many as a thousand computers could be linked up to do the same job. He believes that his system, once completed, will even be able to do supercomputers one better. Multithreading can address a much broader range of applications than traditional super computers. Supercomputers are like a centralized regime, and everything has to be bureaucratic, but multithreading provides a more decentralized structure. Thus, multithreading is better suited for irregular applications.
Supercomputers have too rigid a regime to handle data with an irregular structure.
With multithreading, that's not a problem. Irregular applications could include molecular organic chemistry modelling and genetic modelling, in which supercomputers are hampered by variations in nature. Nature is not precise enough for the number crunching super computers. You could say that super computers have only one finger to work with, but with multi threading, you are working with many fingers. Each finger points to one instruction, and they can all work simultaneously.