page_title: Supercomputer
section_title: Opportunistic approaches
hierarchical_section_title: Supercomputer / Distributed supercomputing / Opportunistic approaches
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Figure présentant deux unités d'un cloud computing sur le même site géographique.
context_page_description: A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second instead of million instructions per second. Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 10¹⁷ FLOPS. Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in China, the United States, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
  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, and physical simulations. They have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.
  Supercomputers were introduced in the 1960s, and for several decades the fastest were made by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation, Cray Research and subsequent companies bearing his name or monogram.
context_section_description: Opportunistic Supercomputing is a form of networked grid computing whereby a "super virtual computer" of many loosely coupled volunteer computing machines performs very large computing tasks. Grid computing has been applied to a number of large-scale embarrassingly parallel problems that require supercomputing performance scales. However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing cannot handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations.
  The fastest grid computing system is the distributed computing project Folding@home (F@h). F@h reported 2.5 exaFLOPS of x86 processing power As of April 2020. Of this, over 100 PFLOPS are contributed by clients running on various GPUs, and the rest from various CPU systems.
  The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform hosts a number of distributed computing projects. As of February 2017, BOINC recorded a processing power of over 166 petaFLOPS through over 762 thousand active Computers (Hosts) on the network.
  As of October 2016, Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search's (GIMPS) distributed Mersenne Prime search achieved about 0.313 PFLOPS through over 1.3 million computers. The Internet PrimeNet Server supports GIMPS's grid computing approach, one of the earliest and most successful grid computing projects, since 1997.
caption: Example architecture of a grid computing system connecting many personal computers over the internet
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