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Bruce Segee   Watch the video   High Resolution Low Resolution

What does a supercomputer make possible at the University of Maine?

The supercomputer allows you to do work that normally would take many months or years to do. The supercomputer allows multiple CPUs (central processing units) of computers to work together to solve a problem, a numerical problem generally--modeling, for example. Artic ice or ocean currents or atmospheric turbulence or things of that nature. But where a model may take months to run on a regular computer, that same thing could be done in hours or days on a supercomputer. If you have a computer that could go, for example, a hundred times faster, what you could do in a day would normally take you three months on a conventional computer.