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The term high performance computing (HPC) refers to the use of (parallel) supercomputers and computer clusters, that is, computing systems comprised of multiple (usually mass-produced) processors linked together in a single system with commercially available interconnects. This is in contrast to mainframe computers, which are generally monolithic in nature. While a high level of technical skill is undeniably needed to assemble and use such systems, they can be created from off-the-shelf components. Because of their flexibility, power, and relatively low cost, HPC systems increasingly dominate the world of supercomputing. Usually, computer systems in or above the teraflop-region are counted as HPC-computers.
The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research. A related term, High-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). Recently, HPC has come to be applied to business uses of cluster-based supercomputers, such as data warehouses, line-of-business (LOB) applications and transaction processing.
The most powerful high performance computers can be found on the Top 500 list at (http://www.top500.org). The top500 list (which consists of the top 500 most powerful computing systems of any kind in the world, including many which are not HPC systems) is updated twice a year, once in June at the ISC European Supercomputing Conference and again at a US Supercomputing Conference in November.
Many ideas for the new wave of grid computing were originally borrowed from HPC.
High-performance computing is one of the unsolved problems in computer science.
See also
- High-performance technical computing
- Distributed computing
- Quantum computing
- Open problems in high performance computing
External links
"High-performance computing"