Distributed computing &quot;across the planet&quot; only works with low-bandwidth&#x2F;low-latency tasks. Take a look at the various distributed internet projects (the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, Folding@Home, etc) and they are ones that process for a long time and send back a small amount of data, typically to a single server.<p>People use supercomputers for problems, like weather forecasting, which depend on high-bandwidth, low latency interconnects. For example, the Cray CS-Storm (which the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre will be using) supports &quot;QDR or FDR InfiniBand with Mellanox ConnectX®-3&#x2F;Connect-IB, or Intel True Scale host channel adapters&quot; (quoting <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cray.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;resources&#x2F;CrayCS-Storm.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cray.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;resources&#x2F;CrayCS-Sto...</a> ).<p>To prevent congestion, the supercomputer network topology might even be wired so each pair of neighboring nodes has a dedicated connection.