Seriously, what's the difference between a supercomputer and a mainframe computer?

i mean to keep it simple, Mainframe Computers are optimized for storage and I/O. Supercomputers are optimized for Compute.

At the end of the day both are Hardware Clusters configured to do one task or another.

I think it’s the same difference like between supercomputer and cloud.

Same shit but different package.

"mainframe" is more of a historical term, from back when regular computers occupied entire rooms (like supercomputers do now), and users would have just "terminals", which were just a screen and a keyboard sending IO to the mainframe. (Terminals nowadays are emulators of actual terminals).

Supercomputers are not exactly accessed through terminals, but the whole concept of computer in a room, operated by a simpler device elsewhere stands, and thus the names kinda blend.

A mainframe as already mentioned is optimized for io and storage but it also contains lots of specialized chips for encryption, zip/unzip and other common processing tasks.

They are also designed around redundancy and uptime to make sure things keep running.

You can swap out almost anything in runtime, even hardware like cpu and memory by shifting running apps to other cores.

This is also why they are still in use in many critical implementations.

You can so the same in the cloud or with your own clusters BUT you would ned to built it into your applications.

With a mainframe the application just keeps running.