And the problems don't get much bigger than the birth of the universe. Physicists at Columbia University in the US have constructed one of the world's fastest supercomputers, capable of performing 400 billion calculations per second to simulate the three trillion degree conditions that theoretically existed when the Big Bang occurred and space time came into existence.
Columbia has developed a reputation for these ultra-fast but relatively cheap parallel machines, which it also builds for others. It will soon complete a 600 billion calculations per second machine which it hopes to link with the first to achieve trillion calculations per second speeds, in a machine costing less than $4 million (£2.86m).
Parallel supercomputers are so fast because they are a collection of individual computers linked together to allow parallel, rather than sequential, processing.