High-Performance Computing Introduction
What is a Supercomputer
Supercomputers use parallelism though the use of multiple powerful computers to compute very fast. Multiple compute nodes communicate through fast networking in order to consolidate their power.
Applications
- Weather Modelling
- Disease Modelling
- Drug Design and Testing
- Large Machine Learning Models
- Scientific Research
Reasoning
- Faster computers allow more accurate answers. This allows us to:
- Produce longer forecasts.
- Capture more phenomena together.
- Multiprocessor machines allow us to:
- Address more memory.
- Not be limited by the speed of a single processor.
Parallel Computing
Parallel computing makes use of pipe-lining serial code, or solving the same problem using different data, in order to increase the speed of computation by distributing it’s load onto several processors. Parallelism is hard to achieve as:
- Humans find is easier to think, and program, sequentially.
- The von-Neumann architecture is inherently sequential.