High performance computing (HPC) uses advanced technologies to solve complex computational problems with precision, speed, and efficiency. It is primarily used in science, the military, academia, and increasingly in business. Parallel processing and supercomputers are key to HPC, with supercomputers rated by their floating point operations per second (FLOPS). HPC also extends to technical problems in engineering, known as High Performance Engineering Computing (HPTC). The Top500 list centralizes a database of the best high-performance computers and defines HPC standards.
High performance computing (HPC) is the use of advanced computing technologies, such as supercomputers and parallel processing algorithms, to understand complex computational problems. The technology is primarily used by those in science, the military, and academia. As business transactions become more complex, HPC is used in the areas of data storage and transaction processing, as well as in the extraction or use of that information for statistical purposes.
The main goal in high performance computing is to solve computational problems with precision, speed and efficiency. Parallel processing, which uses more than one central processing unit (CPU) to compute a problem and is technically supposed to make the computation much faster, is key to the success of HPC. Other forms of increased computing speed, including multiple computers linked together known as clustered computers, also contribute to high-performance computing.
Supercomputers are also used in the process of high performance computing. The terms supercomputer and supercomputing can be confusing because they are sometimes interchanged with the terms high-performance computing and high-performance computing, but they can also be considered a specialized form of high-performance computing. For all intents and purposes, however, supercomputer refers to a computer capable of calculating a high rate of efficiency.
The calculations performed by a supercomputer are rated at the rate it can perform floating point operations per second (FLOPS), which is the amount of calculations with numbers it can perform per second. Floating point refers to the decimal point in a number which, because it is “floating,” can represent a number to a greater degree of precision than a fixed-point operation. The amount of FLOPS required to be considered a supercomputer is a teraflop or more, a value expressed by 10 to the twelfth power in scientific notation, or 12 of FLOPS. There are supercomputers, however, that can go up to petaflops, which is 1,000,000,000,000 FLOPS.
The use of high-performance computing also extends to some technical problems, typically in engineering fields, such as the petrochemical industry and computational fluid dynamics. When used in this way, HPC is referred to as High Performance Engineering Computing (HPTC). There is overlap between all fields, so it is not always clear what constitutes HPTC or HPC, and the terms are in many ways synonymous.
The best high-performance computers are filed in a list known as the Top500. This list was created to centralize a database and create policies to define high performance computing standards. It is maintained by scientists in Germany and the United States and is updated twice a year.
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