In earlier days supercomputers captured the obscure place of scientists' laboratories and were only used for the complex calculations in areas like physics. Scientists still use supercomputers, but nowadays manufacturers, movie studios, and government agencies use them too.

When Seymour Cray made the world’s first supercomputer in the 1970s, he could merely have thought what the descendants of his invention would be doing after some 30 years. That first supercomputer found a home at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. At present, scientists and laboratories greatly utilize supercomputers, but these powerful number-crunching machines carry a lot of other jobs as well, in the government and in the private sectors too.

The advancements in the computers and supercomputers cost and performance can be complimented for the expansion of their use. That first supercomputer in 1976 cost about $8.8 million. It operated at a speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and possessed an 8 MB memory. In June of this year, IBM previewed an off-the-shelf supercomputer capacity of 87.3 billion floating point operations per second. At present even a cheap computer has the capacity of many gigaflops, beating Cray’s first supercomputer at a fraction of the cost. Overall, at present even the average middle-class teenager has the access to more than a 1000 times as much computing power in his or her home than the best scientists could access 30 years back.

It is fact that science is the most exciting place for supercomputers to show their worth. Scientists are harnessing their computing power for projects that involve modeling the development of the universe, the weather of the earth, and mapping all the neurons in the human brain. Supercomputers even played a big role in the Human Genome Project, a 13-year-long international project that succeeded in recognizing all of the genes in human DNA and determining the sequences of its 3 billion chemical base pairs. Completed in 2003, the results of the project will keep medical researchers busy for many years as they decode the genes’ functions and plan likely treatments for genetic diseases.

At present a lot of businesses are using supercomputers for ordinary functions.