What is HPC?

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and clusters to solve complex problems.

Cluster Architecture

A typical HPC cluster consists of:

  1. Head node: Manages and distributes workloads
  2. Compute nodes: Perform computations
  3. Storage: Parallel file systems (Lustre, GPFS)
  4. Network: High-speed interconnects (InfiniBand, Slingshot)

Real-world Applications

  • Climate simulation
  • Drug design
  • Large-scale AI/ML training
  • Financial analysis