Super computers V/s Mainframe computers

The computer comes in many different sizes from its very beginning. Super computers are the largest and fastest computers available but very much expensive computer systems. they are used in specialized areas such as defense, aircraft design, weather research, etc. super computers mainly does the parallel processing that is one supercomputer employ so many processors which works in parallel to perform large number of complex operations simultaneously. Super computer can support 10s of thousand of terminal simultaneously. Super computer instruction processing speed is normally in Billions of instructions per second.

Mainframe computers are less powerful and cheaper than super computers. However, they are big general purpose computers capable of handling all kinds of scientific and business applications. Mainframe computers can process at several million instructions per second. They can support more than one thousand remote terminals. They have an online secondary storage capacity and also facilitate multiprogramming and time sharing.