AN INTRODUCTION TO HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING: TECHNOLOGY, TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Traditionally High Performance was applied to very computationally demanding problems in science and engineering. They were known as the Grand Challenge Problems that required supercomputers equiped with very large computer memories and capable of high rates of computation measured by Megaflops (Million Floating Point Operations per second). In the last two decades the world of business and industry has recognized the enormous potential of large distributed computer systems for their business enterprise applications. Today most of the existng high performance computers are employed in the enterprise environments. A typical system has three layers of servers: user interface, applications and database. These Client/Server architectures are the working horse of the large enterprise information processing. This introductory paper describes both areas of High Performance Computing applications that differ in the nature of workload, performance objectives, design methodology and scientific focus.