High Performance Computing

What is High Performance Computing?

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of computers to support scientists, engineers and other analysts in doing numerically or data intensive work. It includes computing systems from workstations and servers used to support technical workgroups through to super-computers purchased and configured to solve the world's most demanding problems.

What sort of people use HPC systems?

The HPC market is broad and diverse, spanning all numerically intensive computing markets including:

For many people highly specialized, monolithic proprietary systems still characterize high performance computing. Yet in the wider commercial space for HPC a fundamental change has occurred over the last few years where industry standard systems have come to dominate the market by combining excellent performance with the cost benefits of volume markets. While scaling capability by adding more systems and CPUs to clustered architectures has been the best solution for many users in recent years, the costs in terms of power consumption, cooling, space and overall management complexity are now driving the need for more sophisticated approaches. Today's visionaries are pushing the next wave of HPC system architectures by deploying hybrid clusters where a range of complementary technologies are combined to deliver the optimum match of overall system characteristics to required workloads while paying careful attention to the environmental and economic impact of those systems.

Some HPC users are focused on open-ended research that advances the frontiers of human knowledge, others are using HPC systems in well understood situations to achieve specific objectives. Some have access to the world's most advanced supercomputers, some to powerful production clusters and others to a single workstation. Despite this diversity HPC users share some common traits.

Most users of HPC systems are driven people. Some are driven to achieve something for the first time, to gain new insight through better accuracy or detail of analysis. Others are driven to produce results sufficiently fast that it enables people to make better decisions, substantially improve their productivity or to predict events that can change or save lives.

The very nature of HPC is that the solution to one set of questions or problems generates yet another set of questions. These next-step problems are generally more complex than their predecessors. Subsequently, more accurate and powerful tools are required to move ahead which generates an insatiable thirst for compute cycles and a compulsion to achieve constantly increasing levels of performance, accuracy and precision. This imperative has been summed up very well by the Council on Competitiveness, an organization that advocates for and educates about the benefits of HPC. Put very simply they state, "The organization that out computes, out competes."