Question: Are scientists computers more advanced than ours?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 7 Nov 2014:

Sometimes. Some areas of science generate ridiculous amounts of data, so much that it’d take most regular computers days to complete a single test on it. It used to be that you had to put up with waiting days, or you bought a hugely expensive supercomputer. These days cloud computing has gotten very popular, where a company networks dozens or hundreds of powerful computers together so they all work on one problem much quicker. Google and Amazon do a lot of that, and they just rent out “computer space” to people who need it.

My computer here in the lab is a bit rubbish, to be honest, but I only need it for writing reports and checking emails. If I have a seriously complicated problem like some of the metagenomics I mentioned in my profile, I’d send the data away to a special computer network and tell them what calculations I want run, and they could get results back to me in a few hours.