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High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Today, computer systems approaching the teraflops-region are counted as HPC-computers.
Overview
The term is most commonly associated with computing used for scientific research. A related term, High-performance technical computing (HPTC), generally refers to the engineering applications of cluster-based computing (such as computational fluid dynamics and the building and testing of virtual prototypes). Recently, HPC has come to be applied to business uses of cluster-based supercomputers, such as data warehouses, line-of-business (LOB) applications and transaction processing.
High-performance computing (HPC) is a term that arose after the term "supercomputing." HPC is sometimes used as a synonym for supercomputing; but in other contexts, "supercomputer" is used to refer to a more powerful subset of "high performance computers," and the term "supercomputing" becomes a subset of "high performance computing." The potentially confusing overlap of these usages is apparent.
High Productivity Computing
To reflect a greater focus on the productivity, rather than just the performance, of large-scale computing systems, many believe[citation needed] that HPC should now stand for High Productivity Computing.
Top 500
A list of the most powerful high performance computers can be found on the TOP500 list. The TOP500 list ranks the world's 500 fastest high performance computers as measured by the HPL benchmark. Not all computers are listed, either because they are ineligible (e.g. they cannot run the HPL benchmark) or their owners have not submitted a HPL score (e.g. because they do not wish the size of their system to become public information). The list is updated twice a year, once in June at the ISC European Supercomputing Conference and again at a US Supercomputing Conference in November.
Many ideas for the new wave of grid computing were originally borrowed from HPC.
See also
External links
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