What Are The Characteristics Of Supercomputers?

Supercomputers have massive parallelism and very high computational speed.  Often they have specific hardware to handle large amounts of floating point operations or vector operations. 

Disadvantages are usually cost related.  They are large, expensive to maintain, and require a lot of electrical power.

They are fast and tend to renew by the minute

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as
problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the
structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers,
and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in
wind
tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion). A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge
problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite
computing resources.