What Are The Disadvantages Of A Supercomputer?

The construction of a supercomputer is an awesome and incredibly expensive task. To get a machine from a laboratory into the market could take several years. The most recent growth costs of supercomputers varied some where between 150 to 500 million dollars or even more. You could imagine that a project of this magnitude draws on all the assets that a company has. This is one of the key reasons that the development of a supercomputer is generally kept very confidential. The latest supercomputers are generally only possible to create by the help of governments and at least one or more large organisations.
Using a supercomputer is quiet expensive as well. A user is charged according to the number of processor (CPU) seconds your program uses. Cray, (which was one of the first supercomputers) use to cost $1,000 per hour. The term "Cray time" had become very common in order to express the computer costs in dollars and time. Another problem faced by supercomputers is the software which is used for processing; currently the software has been outpaced by the supercomputing hardware. After installing a supercomputer it can take another year before the system becomes totally operational.

Super computers are known for their processing speed. They have several disadvantages like;
- It can overheat due to its large size, so it has a shorter lifetime.
- More time consuming for one component to interact with another component of the machine.
- Can not operate without a proper climate control.

Well that depends on your usage of the term supercomputer, generally speaking it means a computer (or multiple linked computers) intended on computing massive amounts of data for projects like mapping the human genome and other science stuff of that scale.

I am assuming you mean a very fast computer with the latest hardware though.

Advantages: Speed, amount of things that can run at once without it slowing down, better graphics capabilities for gaming and graphics designing, and smoother performance.

Disadvantages: Power usage, heat, cost and in the case of overclocked computers heat that leads to damage to the components which in turn will raise the cost through replacement parts. In the case of 64 bit processors, (which can provide better processing capabilities) there can be the downside of compatibility issues for some software.