You are generally correct, however there are workloads that do use larger portions of a supercomputer that wouldn't be feasible on smaller systems. Also, I gue

You are generally correct, however there are workloads that do use larger portions of a supercomputer that wouldn't be feasible on smaller systems. Also, I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "smaller systems that focus more on power/cost/space". A proper queueing system generally efficiently allocates the resources of a large supercomputer to smaller tasks, while also making larger tasks possible in the first place. And I imagine there's somewhat an efficiency of scale in a large installation like this. There are, of course, many many smaller supercomputers, such as at most medium to large universities. But even those often have 10-50k cores or so. (In general, efficiency is a consideration when building/running, but not of using. Scientists want the most computational power they can get, power usage be damned :) ) edit: A related topic is capacity vs. capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#Capability_versus_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#Capability_versu...