Question: Do you know how they make the computers so powerful?

Matthew Bainbridge answered on 4 Mar 2017:

The main way they are making computers more powerful today is by putting more ‘cores’ (the silicon wafers that actually do the computing) on a single CPU and then putting more CPUs in one computer. When I was in elementary school all computers came with one CPU and each CPU had one core. Super computers can have over 32 CPUs per computer, and 8 cores (sometimes more) per CPU.
Often, then, multiple (hundreds or thousands) computers are linked together to form a ‘cluster’. When I have a big compute job I can type a single command and it will break that job up into lots of smaller jobs and give each job to one core.