Whilst a desktop PC typically features 4 processing cores, supercomputers contain thousands of cores. Supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems where a very high rate of calculation or simulation is required.

The Supercomputing Wales facilities are used by research groups at the consortium universities – Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth – along with companies and other partners working on collaborative projects.

The supercomputing hubs currently include over 30,000 processing cores, connected to high speed memory and storage, delivering 2 Petaflops of computing power. This is equivalent to two thousand million million (2×10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second.

Supercomputing facilities are often used to computationally analyse very large data sets underpinned by extreme storage requirements in order to leverage software that can reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.