Whatever Happened to Business Supercomputers?

Then, suddenly, both technology and businesses took a different course. Chris Monroe, co-founder of and chief scientist at quantum computing company IonQ, offers a simple explanation for the abrupt change in interest. "Supercomputers failed to catch on because, although they bring the promise of speed and ability to process large computational problems, they come with a significant physical footprint [and] energy/cooling requirements," he notes. "When it comes to mainstream adoption, supercomputers never hit the right balance of affordability, size, access, and value-add enterprise use cases." Supercomputers have traditionally been defined by the fact that they bring together a collection of parallel hardware providing a very high computational throughput and rapid interconnections.