A personal supercomputer (PSC) is a marketing ploy used by

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...

manufacturers for

high-performance computer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

systems and was a popular term in the mid 2000s to early 2010s. There is no exact definition for what a personal supercomputer is. Many systems have had that label put on them like the Cray CX1 and the

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

Power Mac G4. Generally, though the label is used on computers that are High end

Workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...

s and Servers and have multiple

processors A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...

and is small enough to fit on a desk or to the side. Other terms like PSC are Desktop/deskside supercomputers and supercomputers in a box.

Deskside clusters

This is the closest thing to a formal definition of a personal supercomputer as most Computers marketed as personal supercomputers are Deskside clusters like the Cray CX1. A Deskside cluster is as defined b
insideHPC.com
“Deskside clusters come in a chassis that you can plug into the wall of your office, and they are designed to sit on the floor next to your desk. The chassis can hold a relatively small number of computers that are on blades, trays, or in enclosures that slide into the chassis and bundle everything together.” The Blade or node are equipped with CPU/s and

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

also it may be equipped with

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

/s so that it may be used for

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve c ...

or for computation and the blade may have bays for hard drives built in.

Applications

They can be used in medical applications for processing brain and body scans, resulting in faster diagnosis. Another application is persistent

aerial surveillance A surveillance aircraft is an aircraft used for surveillance. They are operated by military forces and other government agencies in roles such as intelligence gathering, battlefield surveillance, airspace surveillance, reconnaissance, observa ...

where large amounts of video data need to be processed and stored. Also they are used in AI for

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. One more use is in the field of

data analysis Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, enc ...

which requires large amounts of computational power.

Computers marketed as personal supercomputers

Deskside clusters

* TyanPSC * Cray CX1 *

SGI Octane SGI may refer to: Companies *Saskatchewan Government Insurance *Scientific Games International, a gambling company *Silicon Graphics, Inc., a former manufacturer of high-performance computing products *Silicon Graphics International, formerly Rac ...

III

High End Workstations

* Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer *

Nvidia DGX Nvidia DGX is a line of Nvidia-produced servers and workstations which specialize in using GPGPU to accelerate deep learning applications. The typical design of a DGX system is based upon a rackmount chassis with motherboard that carries high pe ...

Station

Other computers

Intel iPSC The Intel Personal SuperComputer (Intel iPSC) was a product line of parallel computers in the 1980s and 1990s. The iPSC/1 was superseded by the Intel iPSC/2, and then the Intel iPSC/860. iPSC/1 In 1984, Justin Rattner became manager of the Inte ...

References

External links

Nvidia.com

insideHPC.com
Classes of computers Personal computers {{compu-eng-stub