| Comparison | Mainframe | Supercomputer |
| Date | Started in the 1950s. The first successful mainframe computer is invented by IBM. | Started in 1960s. Seymour Cray invent the Supercomputer. |
| Task | Perform tasks on huge amounts of external data. Run multiple programs concurrently. | Focused on speed and accelerated performance. Much processing power than mainframes. They are often a cluster or grid of smaller computers working together on whatever problem they are looking to solve. |
| Use Case | Handle mission-critical business workloads. Example: updates a database system for inventory control (goods), airline reservations (services), or banking (debit and credit cards processing) | Supercomputers designed for academic or research purposes, rather than for hosting workloads that you’d find in a typical business. Super computers are used for large and complex mathematical computations. Example: forecasting weather and quantum physics. |
| Size | Size of a refrigerator, Mainframe computers smaller than supercomputer in size. | Supercomputers are the largest computers. |
| Cost | Mainframe computers are less costly than supercomputers. | Supercomputers are the most costly in the worlds. |
| Operating System | Run many different kinds of operating systems (z/OS, Linux, etc.). | Typically run a variant of Linux as their operating system. |
| User | Support many concurrent users | Usually do not support many concurrent users. |
| Measurement | Have performance measured in Millions of Instructions per Second (MIPS) | Have performance measured in Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS) |
| Example | IBM with Z Systems (leader), Unisys with ClearPath Libra, Hitachi co-developed the zSeries z900 with IBM, Fujitsu (formerly Siemens)with BS2000, and Fujitsu-ICL VME. | IBM Summit (2018), Sunway TaihuLigh (2016), Cray Titan (2012), IBM Roadrunner (2008) and Fujitsu K computer (2011) |
