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To many practitioners (people using HPC rather than people designing HPC), HPC means an aggregation of computing resources to deliver orders of magnitude of hig

To many practitioners (people using HPC rather than people designing HPC), HPC means an aggregation of computing resources to deliver orders of magnitude of higher performance than one could get from a single workstation. Obviously if you have a special purpose system you can made different trades-off. It should be obvious, but the post I was reacting to was claiming that it cannot be 'real HPC' without high-speed interconnects. It depends on what you are a cluster/HPC facilities for. Typically institutions (such as universities) have different facilities with different trade-offs.

mmt 8y ago
> HPC means an aggregation of computing resources to deliver orders of magnitude of higher performance than one could get from a single workstation. > the post I was reacting to was claiming that it cannot be 'real HPC' without high-speed interconnects That was me, and that's still my point. The perception of users that have the embarassingly parallel workload isn't particularly meaningful. We already had the pretty generic terms "grid computing", "distributed computing" and "cluster". What's the point of nomenclature like "HPC" if it describes something that's indistinguishable from that single workstation merely multiplied by some large number, somehow attached over the Internet? If it's not "real HPC", then what is a better term of art to describe the sort of computing that can deliver high performance to workloads that include ones that are not embarrassingly parallel?