The systems an MPI based or similar application will run on consist of multiple independent systems (nodes), each of which is connected to the others using some kind of network interface. For high-end applications, these tend to be custom nodes with high-speed, low-latency interconnects. At the other end of the spectrum are so-called Beowulf and similar type clusters, made out of standard (desktop) computers and usually connected using regular Ethernet.
At the time of writing, the fastest supercomputer (according to the TOP500 listing) is the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. It uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore RISC architecture-based CPUs, with ...
