Supercomputers aren't good for mining. Also you can think of a supercomputer as a set of highly networked nodes, so without software the supercomputer wouldn't be that useful.



What I'd probably do is to get some commercial ray tracing software and write an animated Valentine's day card. Either that or just run some prime number finding software.



If you give me a week's notice, I can start programming something more useful. What I would likely do is to take the MESA stellar evolution code, and do some parameter searches.



One other thing is that I worked at a big investment bank, and I can tell you what they used the supercomputers for. It was risk management calculations. You have one derivative security. You can calculate the price of that on a desktop system. The bank has tens of thousands of these securities, and the Fed wants to know what happens under condition X, and the traders want to know how much they are likely to make or lose on a typical day. So you need to run massive numbers of scenarios. This is the type of thing that a supercomputer is perfect for.



What is interesting is that the supercomputers at the bank that I worked at were Intel systems with Nvidia GPU's and ran the same software as the desktop systems. So if you wanted to price one set of options you did it on your desktop, whereas once you booked the option, the banks supercomputer would start to risk manage it with the ton of other securities you had.



Supercomputers aren't used for algo trading. Mainframes are.