Supercomputers are generally known to be room-sized monoliths. But if one goes by the current trend, the supercomputer is on its way to becoming compact as applications traditionally found in them are heading to the desktop PC. Massive improvements in desktop processing power, graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, network bandwidth and solid-state drive speed combined with 64-bit throughput have made the desktop increasingly viable for large-scale computing projects. Thanks to these developments, a transition to a supercomputer on your desk will soon be reality.

Earthquake simulations, nuclear-stockpile simulations and DNA research will stay on traditional supercomputers for now. But as processor technology advances to multiple cores in the next 10 years, even they could make their way to the desktop. Some high-performance applications are already running on smaller computers.

At Temple University, researchers have developed models that measure the effects of applying anesthesia on molecules within nerve cells. The models currently run on a supercomputer, but plans are underway to perform the calculations on an Nvidia GPU cluster with four nodes. Injection-molding simulations are vital to car makers as simulations reveal defects. Simulations used to require a significant cluster-computing installation. Now the same level of power is being achieved with current desktop computers.
One of the most interesting ways High Performance Computing (HPC) is coming to the desktop is through the Web. The best example of this right now is on Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine on the Web that is designed to collect and curate all objective data and make it possible to compute about anything. While the searches you launch at WolframAlpha.com are still conducted on a supercomputer, the results return almost instantly, right in your browser.

Other applications touted to be used extensively on the desktop are whether forecasts, special effects for movies, construction of 3D scenes from massive collections of public photographs and live transcriptions of teleconferences with speaker IDs.