This is a good question.   And, surprisingly, there are many possible answers, depending on the needs of a scientist.

The short answer:  No, my desk top computer has only one main processor.   Yes, if you take into account the very advanced GPU (with 100s of processing units) in my desktop computer.   And, yes, if you take into account the availability of 100s of full-fledged processors that are available to me (in my faculty) for parallel processing.

Many-task computing aims to bridge the gap between two computing paradigms, high throughput computing and high performance computing. Many task computing differs from high throughput computing in the emphasis of using large number of computing resources over short periods of time to accomplish many computational tasks

Many-Task Computing leads to a stronger appreciation of the fact that applications that are not tightly coupled via MPI are not necessarily embarrassingly parallel: some have just so many simple tasks that managing them is hard, some operate on or produce large amounts of data that need sophisticated data management in order to scale. There also exist applications that involve MPI ensembles, essentially many jobs where each job is composed of tightly coupled MPI tasks, and there are loosely coupled applications that have dependencies among tasks, but typically use files for inter-process communication. Efficient support for these sorts of applications on existing large scale systems, including future ones will involve substantial technical challenges and will have big impact on science.

http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/publications/2008_MTAGS08_MTC.pdf

Dear Shafagat,

Are you joking or is it a very theoretical question?

Neither me, nor my work place can afford such a computer.

Dear Shafagat,

Are you joking or is it a very theoretical question?

Neither me, nor my work place can afford such a computer.

Dear Dr. Shafagat Mahmudova 

Yes, I use super computers in my research, because they are very necessary in my area of research.

Best regards

Dear @ András Bozsik,

I  am not joking. Recently, many scientists are using super computers.  Read the answers, please.

Regards, Shafagat

Dear All

The use of the computer remains essentially as a tool certainly important but not necessarily the most vital. As part of my studies on the landscape, I typically use a lot the visual qualitative methods to establish a landscape mapping. Of GIS in specialized colleagues who bring me their support is a great similarity between the mapping obtained by the visual method to that obtained by computer

Thank you  very much dear @ Krishnan Umachandran & @Fadel Djamel ·

This is a good question.   And, surprisingly, there are many possible answers, depending on the needs of a scientist.

The short answer:  No, my desk top computer has only one main processor.   Yes, if you take into account the very advanced GPU (with 100s of processing units) in my desktop computer.   And, yes, if you take into account the availability of 100s of full-fledged processors that are available to me (in my faculty) for parallel processing.

No., no need of super computer in my research work. Even my University is having super computer.

My desk top and my lap top is sufficient for all my purposes including research work.

I'm a retired scientist and don't use super computers. As for my latest studies before 2000, desk-top computers were sufficient.

No, I do not use super computers in my research. 

Researchers say that Supercomputers give universities a competitive edge!

Clemson University researchers found universities with locally available supercomputers are more efficient in producing research in critical fields than universities that do not have supercomputers. The research for the first time puts data behind the long-held assumption the United States is more competitive by investing in high-performance computing. The study was based on a National Research Council survey of 212 institutions, including 177 universities with high or very high research levels.

see the link for more!

http://cacm.acm.org/news/184898-supercomputers-give-universities-a-competitive-edge-researchers-find/fulltext

Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields, including quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate research, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulations of the early moments of the universe, airplane and spacecraft aerodynamics, the detonation of nuclear weapons, and nuclear fusion). Throughout their history, they have been essential in the field of cryptanalysis.[5]

Systems with massive numbers of processors generally take one of two paths: In one approach (e.g., in distributed computing), a large number of discrete computers (e.g.,laptops) distributed across a network (e.g., the Internet) devote some or all of their time to solving a common problem; each individual computer (client) receives and completes many small tasks, reporting the results to a central server which integrates the task results from all the clients into the overall solution.[6][7] In another approach, a large number of dedicated processors are placed in close proximity to each other (e.g. in a computer cluster); this saves considerable time moving data around and makes it possible for the processors to work together (rather than on separate tasks), for example in mesh and hypercube architectures.

The use of multi-core processors combined with centralization is an emerging trend; one can think of this as a small cluster (the multicore processor in a smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc.) that both depends upon and contributes to the cloud.[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. A supercomputer is typically used for scientific and engineering applications that must handle very large databases or do a great amount of computation (or both). 

At any given time, there are usually a few well-publicized supercomputers that operate at extremely high speeds. The term is also sometimes applied to far slower (but still impressively fast) computers. Most supercomputers are really multiple computers that perform parallel processing. In general, there are two parallel processing approaches: symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP).

IBM's Roadrunner is the fastest supercomputer in the world, twice as fast as Blue Gene and six times as fast as any of the other current supercomputers. At the lower end of supercomputing, a new trend called clustering, takes more of a build-it-yourself approach to supercomputing. The Beowulf Project offers guidance on how to put together a number of off-the-shelf personal computer processors, using Linux operating systems, and interconnecting the processors with Fast Ethernet. Applications must be written to manage the parallel processing.

Perhaps the best-known builder of supercomputers has been Cray Research, now a part of Silicon Graphics. In September 2008, Cray and Microsoft launched CX1, a $25,000 personal supercomputer aimed markets such as  aerospace, automotive, academic, financial services and life sciences. CX1 runs Windows HPC (High Performance Computing) Server 2008.

In the United States, some supercomputer centers are interconnected on an Internetbackbone known as vBNS or NSFNet. This network is the foundation for an evolving network infrastructure known as the National Technology Grid. Internet2 is a university-led project that is part of this initiative.

Dear @ Behrouz Ahmadi-Nedushan, your opinion is interesting, thank you

No, I don't need super computers in my research work.  

Dear Safagat,

I do not use super computer.  My  Laptop is sufficient to accomplish the various tasks that I need. 

Best Regards

Huda

Top Supercomputers-India is an effort to list the most powerful supercomputers in India. It is supported by Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science , Bangalore. This effort is complementary to the Top500 project that lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Top Supercomputers-India can help the Indian installation sites to compare their supercomputing capabilities with their counterparts in India. The project is meant to create and promote healthy competition among the supercomputing initiatives in India and can substantially lead to significant supercomputing advancement in the nation.

http://topsupercomputers-india.iisc.ernet.in/

Dear Shafagat,

I am glad, some scientists are so supported.  

supercomputers are very expensive

Cray, the company often credited with building the world's first supercomputer, is shrinking its largest machine down into a more affordable package.

This isn't the kind of computer a young hacker would buy to toy around with in a garage: It'll set you back $500,000. But compare that to the $1 billion-plus price tag on, say, Fujitsu's "K" supercomputer, installed in Japan in 2011, and you've got a screaming deal.

 Cray's XC30-AC, which goes on sale Tuesday, is Cray's cheapest supercomputer. It has the same software and processors as its big brother, the XC-30, which typically sells for $10 million to $30 million, depending on the configuration. If you were to run a problem on the smaller machine while running the same problem on an equal number of processors in the high-end Cray, you'd get your answer in the same amount of time.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/07/technology/enterprise/cray-supercomputer/

Super computers of that capability probably has to be needed in places where there are huge data to input and a very fast computing processors for optimal efficiency to meet demands. Such computers' main items : data - space complexity and speed- time complexity are enhanced considerably in such cases and with a huge sums of money of course.  

In our "poor" country, we are happy if ordinary computers keep working. Continuous switch on/off  of electricity, by the providers of this service, has caused damage of my PC's monitor since Monday night. I am writing from a borrowed laptop (which I cannot work well with). Best wishes for all. 

In my country, Iraq, super computer is not available.

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

here is a nice article "Kyushu University and Fujitsu Laboratories Use Supercomputer for Real-Time Disaster-Recovery Scheduling Using a big data numerical-analysis platform technology to tackle issues facing society"

Kyushu University,Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.

Fukuoka and Kawasaki, Japan, July 10, 2015

The Institute of Mathematics for Industry(1) at Kyushu University (IMI) and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of a supercomputer-based technology that can quickly formulate optimum work schedules for disaster recovery, such as for repairing lifelines and road networks. please,see the attached article and some more websites relating to our thread here:

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-releases/2015/0710-01.html

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010465585901328

https://www.osc.edu/about/mission

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2015/08/14-obama-supercomputer-initiative

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/55437/20150527/scientists-use-supercomputer-to-find-ways-to-improve-crops.htm

Here is a lovey quotation by the Late "Steve Jobs - The Father of i-everything":

“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

Super computers are not necessary unless your research involves high level data management and very complex computations. In majority of our individual or group researches, availability of super computer is not at all a requirement.

Dear Dr. Shafagat Mahmudova,

In my opinion the classification of super computing shifts but powerful computing systems are needed. However, fast processor, big memory, good networking, effective operating systems, useful software and tools, big data and cloud computing applications can help us to define our own requirements of 'super computing'. 

I am not using super computer. Also not having. It is not useful for me as teacher and researcher.

Thank you dear @Roland Iosif Moraru 

I always use a computer. It's my heart right now. As well as I used statistical program, word, Excel and some other simple program. It will be a great to use the supercomputer near future.

I am willing to use super computers if absolutely necessary 

At the moment laptop with 4Gb processor/1TB HD is serving my purpose 

Super computers why what is the level mathematical equations and orders we intended to solve

creativity and innovations are in mind

I agree with Firakat Hassan that his heart right now

with me it is in mind which is a super computer

I do not use super computers in my research but I would not mind having access to one. I am thinking of a scenario where a web service or a service is hosted on one and simple workstations' applications consume services from super computers. Speeds would be awesomely great especially where heavy computations slow down processing power of computers.

I think that in this day and age, when analyzing large amounts of data the supercomputer is indispensable. Sometimes in my studies, analyzing a few seconds movies recorded at 1000 frames per second, a standard computer perform my instructions from several to tens of hours for exclusively only one film. The powerful computer reduced the time.

Majority of universities are having super computers. I think it is not much useful to have.

Dear Subhash, I do not agree!. Super computers are way too expensive and many universities simply can not afford the high prices!

Growth in supercomputers power!

http://www.singularity.com/charts/page71.html

If you allow,

all of you are using super computers in a nearly perfect way. Your personal SC is your brain!

Dear Hanno,

This is an interesting comparison of human brain and super computers!

You've undoubtedly heard over and over again about what an absurdly complex entity the human brain is. But a new breakthrough by Japanese and German scientists might finally drive the point home. Taking advantage of the almost 83,000 processors of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the team was able to mimic just one percent of one second's worth of human brain activity—and even that took 40 minutes.

Why is it so hard for computers to reproduce what your grey matter does as a matter of course? Volume. The human brain consists of about 200 billion nerve cells (neurons) that are linked together by trillions of connections called synapses. As the tiny electrical impulses shoot across each neuron, they have to travel through these synapses, each of which contains about 1000 different switches that route that electrical impulse. In total, one human brain could contain hundreds of trillions of these neural pathways. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book that stretches from here to Jupiter.

http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only-matched-one-perc-1045026757

Yes dear Behrouz,

that was my motivation for this post. Human brains are not working in the normal way like linear or paralel processors. And our calculation times are slow as compared with artificial SCs. But we have a nearly incredible way to find solution of problems.

Dear Colleagues,

Good Day,

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that leads the world in terms of processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation, at the time of its introduction.

Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research (including research into global warming), molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities, military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.

Please, see the attached link for detail:

https://www-pls.llnl.gov/?url=science_and_technology-materials-thunder

Dear All,

I have to accept the explications of Hanno and Behrouz on the personally fitted SC = individual human brain without electricity consumption. This is the most original and cheapest way for advanced intellectual tasks.