What is H.P.C. and how it works?

Hello Fellas,
It's been a long break for me and the page, first of all, sorry for all this but now the page is back and active as it was.

Today we'll be taking a deep dive into what HPC is, how it works and why so many people are talking about it. Starting with a basic introduction of what HPC stands for and what is basically means.


HPC stands for High-Performance Computing and what it means is aggregating a big amount of computing power in order to solve large problems in almost all fields, there are problems which requires huge computing power which is thus provided by HPC solutions.

Now let's talk about where you might have heard of HPC and related stuff. You might have heard of supercomputers used by many such companies like Google for AI and many other purposes which indeed consists of thousands of processors to tackle problems of huge sizes which requires a whole lot of calculations and data processing to achieve one goal or the other. Many scientists are using to get answers to much bigger problems then we can imagine some of which includes nuclear physics, the big bang and much more.

Traditionally HPC was used by scientists and government institutions and the reason for the same as mentioned above since these problems are no daily life problems which one should be concerned about, but with so much data being pushed in every single day the use of HPC is increasing day by day, wherein businesses are getting their hands to HPC as today it has become so mainstream that for the survival of any business HPC is a must. 

Businesses use HPC to process tons of raw data in order to make predictions and to create simulations. HPC takes the guesswork out of the business decisions, thus HPC for businesses acts as machine wherein you provide a huge amount of data and an algorithm to process and the machine provides you with your desired results within minutes, where a normal desktop would take decades to process the same amount of information. 

You on your personal end can learn/use HPC in one of the following ways:

  • Create your own HPC application, which is not at all an easy task but yes it is not impossible
  • Benchmark your HPC system by running few of the most known benchmarks like
    • HPL
    • Stream
    • WRF 
    • NAMD etc
These benchmarks can help you rate your system specially HPL, it'll tell you where your system stands in the list of top 500 systems if it does.
Running these benchmarks is quite a simple job as compared to creating one but requires a thorough study in order to get the understanding of what you are doing.

In order to get a clear picture of what an HPC system looks like, I'll give you a description of a system which is used for HPC applications. Here is one sample system configuration of an HPC system so that you can have a clear understanding of how much power we are talking about when talking about High-Performance Computing.

A system with about
  • 20 cores per processor * 648 i.e. about 12960 cores in a system, for better reference a good desktop configuration like intel i7 7600u has 2 cores, so your system might also have somewhere around this number only, which means about 6500 systems like this. 
For this much of computing power, we need exponentially similar memory size as well as disk size.

This example above will help you get a clear picture of a system, which is used for HPC, looks like. Now we know that what HPC is, what it looks like, what all applications can be used for benchmarking an HPC system, it is time to see why so many people are talking about HPC.

First, let's see what is the scope of HPC then you'll automatically get to know that why so many people are talking about it.
Let us see some of the business application of HPC in the Financial sector. In the financial sector, HPC is used to process all policy information, online transactions and much more, in order to analyze and process all these information you need some strong computing power which is provided by HPC. HPC in the financial sector is also used to detect Credit card frauds, define new algorithms and much more.
In the field of science, it is used for genome sequencing in order to align DNA and to create new breakthroughs in the field of medicines. It is also used in energy industries providing guidance in where to drill and much more, so the scope of HPC is huge and is expanding day by day thus making this a field where one can definitely get their hands in.

Hope you had a great reading experience, feel free to drop some suggestions in the comment section below.

Next Blog: A Brief about RDMA, RoCE v1 vs RoCE v2 vs iWARP

Till then,

Happy Blogging

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