To break a number with 400 digits down into its constituents, for example, would take the fastest conventional supercomputer billions of years.

Not a conventional supercomputer like a Cray or a Godin, but a computer dedicated to artificial intelligence-a true thinking machine.

Massively parallel machines, in which the United States holds the clear lead, are already starting to displace conventional supercomputers, which rely on one or several high-speed processors.

In short, the speed of this Hive brain makes that of even the fastest of the conventional supercomputers seem annoyingly slow.

As a more cost-effective alternative to conventional supercomputers, the U.S. military has purchased clusters of PS3 units for research purposes.

"It took us 10 years to sell 120 conventional supercomputers."

The machine has a one-time cost of $9,000 to build and is adequate for black-hole simulations which would otherwise cost $6,000 per run on a conventional supercomputer.

Only a special compression algorithm developed by Peter Godin made it possible for a neuromodel to be stored in a conventional supercomputer.

You have one year to build a very fast supercomputer,' I'd probably talk to my friends at Cray," builders of conventional supercomputers.

Most computer designers believe that massively parallel systems will soon displace conventional supercomputers, such as those originally designed in the early 1970's by Seymour Cray.