The term Supercomputing is a relative term by industry definition. It refers to supercomputers which simply are the fastest and most powerful computers at any point in time. The personal computer sitting on your desktop today is more powerful, by many orders of magnitude, than the supercomputers of decades ago.

Supercomputers have historically been used by either well funded commercial and government organizations, or large academic institutions, to solve truly monumental problems. At the time that this was written, supercomputers are being used for problems that have huge data sets such as: modeling the activity of a supercell storm cloud, analyzing radio signals from outer space for patterns, analyzing huge chains of genetic material for medical scientists, and others.

However, at the current rate of technological progress it is very likely that the computer that sits on your desktop in the future, will make the current batch of supercomputers look like toys.