Mainframe is an industry term for a large computer, typically manufactured by a large company such as IBM or Cray for the commercial applications of Fortune 1000 businesses and other large-scale computing purposes such as global weather forecasting and scientific research.
Historically, a mainframe is associated with centralized rather than distributed computing. Today, IBM refers to its larger processors as "large servers" and emphasizes that they can be used to serve distributed users and smaller servers (often mid-frames or microprocessor machines) in a computing network.
Modern desktop machines have far more power than early mainframes. However, the mainframe manufacturers have kept pace to produce machines that do jobs their smaller brethren could never accomplish. Mainframes still house 90% of the data major businesses rely on for mission-critical applications. This is because mainframes have superior performance, reliability, scalability, and security compared to microprocessors.
Unlike smaller machines, mainframes often offload the job of controlling disks, tapes, and other peripheral devices to specialized controllers (really smaller computers), thus freeing the main processor for more important tasks.
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