High Performance Computing encompasses using "supercomputers" with high numbers of CPUs, large parallel storage systems and advanced networks to perform time-consuming calculations. Parallel algorithms and parallelization of storage are essential to this field, as well as issues with complex, fast networking fabrics such as Infiniband.
High Performance Computing(HPC) encompasses many aspects of traditional computing and is utilized by a variety of fields including but not limited to particle physics, computer animation/CGI for major films, cancer/genomics research and modeling the climate. HPC systems, sometimes called 'supercomputers' are typically large numbers of high-performance servers with large numbers of CPUs and cores, interconnected by a high speed fabric or network.
A list of the top500 fastest computers on the planet is maintained as well as a list of the 500 most energy efficient computers. The performance of these systems is measured using the LINPACK benchmark, though a new benchmark using a conjugate gradient method, which is more representative of modern HPC workloads. IBM, Cray and SGI are major manufacturers of HPC systems and software though it should be noted that over 70% of the systems on the top500 list are based on Intel platforms.
Interconnect fabric technology is also crucial to HPC systems, many of which rely on internal high-speed networks made up of Infiniband or similar low-latency high-bandwidth networks. In addition to interconnect technology, GPU and coprocessors have recently been gaining in popularity for their ability to accelerate certain types of workloads.
Software is an additional concern for HPC systems as typical programs are not equipped to run on such a large scale. Many hardware manufacturers also produce their own software stacks for HPC systems which include compilers, drivers, parallelization and math libraries, system management interfaces and profiling tools specifically designed to work with the hardware they produce.
Most HPC systems use a highly modified linux kernel that is stripped down to only the essential components required to run the software on supplied hardware. Many modern HPC systems are setup in a 'stateless' manner, which means that no OS data is stored locally on compute nodes and an OS image is loaded into RAM typically over the network using PXE boot. This functionally allows the nodes to be rebooted into a clean, known-good working state. This is desirable in HPC systems as it is sometimes difficult to effectively cleanup processes that were running across several nodes in parallel cleanly.
