Conclusions
HPC Systems for Supercomputing
- US is world leader in terms of being a producer and user of HPC systems.
- HPC systems account for more than a third of the installed supercomputers
worldwide.
- Most new supercomputers are HPC systems.
- HPC systems will dominate the world of supercomputing all major vendors
now have HPC (parallel) systems on offer.
Using HPC Systems for Supercomputing
- Development software less mature.
- Applications software more complicated - order of magnitude longer to
develop.
- No automatic parallelisation of codes.
- Problems with "dusty deck" codes - need to re-write!
- Longer term research needed into efficient parallel algorithms.
Overall Conclusions...
- Parallel Computing is becoming established, is maturing, but is by no
means dated.
- HPC is the way of the future.
- HPC is strategically very important if we want to compete in a worldwide
market.
Terminology
HPC
High Performance Computing.
Parallelism
Concurrency in problem being solved.
Parallelisation
Act of parallelising a problem.
Task
Independent job.
Spawn
Act of generating an independent process.
Process
A spawned program undertaking a task.
Cluster
A set of workstations on the same network.
Application
Computer program generated by a user.
GC
Grand Challenge.
MPP
Massively Parallel Processing.
Supercomputer
The most powerful computers at that time!
"Dusty Deck"
Codes written and evolved over a considerable time.
Submitted by Mark Johnston
Last updated 6 April 1995