Good question. Technically speaking just running HPL on a cluster is sufficient to get it ranked on top-500. In reality, most HPC sites use high performance in

Good question. Technically speaking just running HPL on a cluster is sufficient to get it ranked on top-500. In reality, most HPC sites use high performance interconnects, such as infiniband or a proprietary high performance ethernet. They are also less likely to use virtualization, and every node looks 'bare metal'. The software stacks are very different, from everything between the distributed memory model, compilers, to the system schedulers and diagnostic software. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of convergence happening between HPC and hyperscale data centers, particularly as hyperscale uses more machine learning, which has a similar flavor to HPC. Many believe that the FANG companies have exaflop capabilities already, but they just aren't well optimized for scientific workloads.