About supercomputers

This site is intended for new users of MetaCentrum. You will learn which problems can be solved with the help of MetaCentrum resources, what software you need, how to acces MetaCentrum and how to prepare and submit your first job.

What are the supercomputers good for

Supercomputers are ordinary computers, just more powerful than "normal" computers. One has to realise why they are more powerful.

In one type of supercomputers -- considered as the real supercomputers by public -- it is because their processors are much faster in computing some exact operations. In particular this is the case of vector supercomputers that are able to process whole vectors (n-tuples) of numbers at a speed of normal processors working only with scalar operands (separate numbers). Nevertheless we don't have a vector supercomputer in MetaCentrum yet.

Generally, the supercomputers needn't have faster processors than are available in PC's or simple servers, but they have a lot of these processors. That has a fundamental impact on which problems supercomputers can compute faster and which they can't.

If one labourer does a job in 2 hours, then 100 labourers...

(to be translated from the Czech version... )