Brief introduction about High Performance Computing

by

Sairajs

By definition, supercomputers are the fastest and most powerful computers available, and at present the term refers to machines with hundreds of thousands of processors. They are the superstars of the highperformance class of computers. Personal computers (PCs) small enough in size and cost to be used by an individual, yet powerful enough for advanced scientific and engineering applications, can also be highperformance computers. We define High Performance Computing as machines with a good balance among the following major elements:

Multi staged (pipelined) functional units.

Multiple central processing units (CPUs) (parallel machines).

Multiple cores.

Fast central registers.

Very large, fast memories.

Very fast communication among functional units.

Vector, video, or array processors.

Software that integrates the above effectively.

As a simple example, it makes little sense to have a CPU of incredibly high speed coupled to a memory system and software that cannot keep up with it.

HPC and supercomputers are often associated with large, government-funded agencies or with academic institutions. However, most High Performance Computing today is in the commercial sector, in fields such as aerospace, automotive, semiconductor design, large equipment design and manufacturing, energy exploration, and financial computing.

HPC is used in other domains in which very large computations”such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetic simulations, and complex materials analysis”must be performed to ensure a high level of accuracy and predictability, resulting in higher quality, and safer, more efficient products. For example, HPC is used to model the aerodynamics, thermal characteristics, and mechanical properties of an automotive sub assembly or components to find exactly the right design that balances efficiency, reliability, cost, and safety, before spending millions of dollars prototyping a real product.

HPC is also found in domains such as 2D and 3D rendering for media and entertainment, genomics and proteomics analysis for life sciences and healthcare, Oil and gas reservoir simulation for energy exploration, and design verification for the semiconductor industry. In the financial sector, HPC is used to perform institutional liquidity simulations and to predict the future values and risks of complex investments. In architectural design, HPC is used to model everything from the structural properties of a building, to the efficiency of its cooling systems under thousands of different input parameters, resulting in millions of different simulation scenarios.

Over time, the growing use of High Performance Computing in research and in the commercial sector, particularly in manufacturing, finance, and energy exploration, coupled with a growing catalog of High Performance Computing applications, created a trend toward HPC platforms built to handle a wider variety of workloads, and these platforms are constructed using more widely available components. This use of commodity hardware components characterizes the cluster and grid era of High Performance Computing. Clusters and grids continue to be the dominant methods of deploying High Performance Computing in both the commercial and research/academic sectors. Economies of scale, and the need to centrally manage resources across large organizations with diverse requirements, have resulted in the practical reality that widely divergent applications are often run on the same, shared HPC infrastructure.

High performance computing can happen on:

A workstation, desktop, laptop, smartphone!

A supercomputer

A Linux/MacOS/Windows/… cluster

A grid or a cloud

Cyber infrastructure = any combination of the above

More information about

High performance computing

please visit : http://www.ironsystems.com

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