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Virtualizing a Supercomputer
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.
Most of them would be running an application done in C/C++ or some other low level language with threading. The whole advantage of super computers isn't that they have an absurd ghz rating, but an insane amount of cores. This could be useful for testing how a network of desktop computers would work, which it sounds like from the summary they are doing.
TL:DR; Normal desktop software doesn't run faster on a super computer than on your 4 year old laptop.