The second stage solves the system of linear equations to compute the discrete logs of the factor base. A system of hundreds of thousands or millions of equations is a significant computation requiring large amounts of memory, and it is "not" embarrassingly parallel, so a supercomputer is typically used. This was considered a minor step compared to the others for smaller discrete log computations. However, larger discrete logarithm records were made possible only by shifting the work away from the linear algebra and onto the sieve (i.e., increasing the number of equations while reducing the number of variables).