Supercomputers are primarily are designed to be used in enterprises and organizations that require massive computing power. A supercomputer incorporates architectural and operational principles from parallel and grid processing, where a process is simultaneously executed on thousands of processors or is distributed among them. Although supercomputers houses thousands of processors and require substantial floor space, they contain most of the key components of a typical computer, including a processor(s), peripheral devices, connectors, an operating system and applications.

As of 2013, IBM Sequoia is the fastest supercomputer to date. It has more than 98,000 processors that allow it to process at a speed of 16,000 trillion calculations per second.