What is HPC?

Everything out there in this universe is complex, but presented to us in a simple way hiding all the inner complexities through a popular philosophy known as abstraction. For example God can be considered as an abstraction to define the unsolved scientific mysteries. “I believe in God”. Computers are made, sorry evolved to this stage just to cover the complexity of applications by one of the pillars of abstraction which is the speed. Normally when two different applications are run simultaneously, the application which runs faster will be considered simple and the other complex to a naked eye. But what about the case of underlying hardware in which the both applications are run, a simple application A when running in a Pentium computer will run slow whereas a comparatively complex application B running in a Intel i7 will get its task done in the time for blink of our eye provided the same amount of input to both. So if the hardware is covered from your eyes, will you say “B is simpler than A”! :-). This is known as abstracting the complexity of an application using the speed. So whatever the application is, the actual “computer” which is the processor decides how the application is run.

The need for applications which helps us in doing our day to day activities is increasing. The use of both soft real-time and hard real-time applications in our day to day life is inevitable. Also these applications have to be “optimized” enough in order to speed them up so that we won’t get annoyed by the slow hanging process which done a constant check to our temper once upon a time. By the word optimized I mean both hardware and software optimizations. Simple applications and programs can be optimized easily. Their performance can be boosted enough through simple software optimization alone. For example ‘using Quick sort instead of Bogo sort’. But what if the application is really very complex and runs for days together even with maximum linear (discussed later) software optimization. Scientific applications like weather forecasting, simulations of fluid dynamics, crash modeling simulation of a Mercedes, calculations to justify the presence of water in mars etc, exhibit such scenario. Software optimizations alone are not enough to make these kinds of applications run faster. Thus we go for a specialized computer to run these applications which is known as a Supercomputer. This is main problem domain which ‘High Performance computing’ or ‘High Throughput Computing’ (there exists technical differences between both HPC and HTC, we will discuss it soon) actually deals with. Thus HPC is a backbone for the Darwinism of computers. What was once considered a supercomputer is now before you. Yes you are reading this article with the help of a 1950’s supercomputer. Computers evolve through HPC.  Today’s supercomputers will be in hands of your grandchildren don’t worry :-). HPC is the mantra behind the trailing number of ‘O’s in your Google search result. To put simply, HPC is a field of designing a complex hardware and software system for crunching large amount of numbers and algorithms along with rigorous optimizations.      

Where is HPC used? – Everywhere will be the certain answer. Yes, for example as I said above when one searches for a word ‘hair’ in Google or BingJ, he/she uses HPC. Bio sciences, military, energy, government labs, weather forecasting, EDA, etc etc etc. With enough outline of what HPC is we can delve into next level of HPC from next post where we will see about the world’s first supercomputer. If you have any doubts and queries, please feel free to comment it.