To make a comparison between your computer's processor and a supercomputer, multiply your computer's power by 1000... Then imagine a room completely filled with such computers, all stacked one atop another, linked through an incredibly fast network. A software that would take years to process certain data on a home computer would take mere seconds to perform the same task on a supercomputer.
If you weren't familiar with them until now, this should create a fairly vivid picture of how fast a supercomputer actually is.
Even though somehow running Crysis 2 on such a machine would be every gamers dream, these devices are used for serious business - they perform climate analysis, energy analysis, run nuclear explosion simulations, are used for human genome research; basically, everything that requires handling enormous amounts of data in a very short amount of time.
At this moment, the fastest of the fastest - a giant among giants, is Roadrunner, developed and operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It operates at one petaflop per second - that's tens of thousands of trillions calculations done in a single second.
IBM designed the system for this machine - let's just hope that they don't plan to give it an AI.
