Tech – Buzzwords: High Performance Computing
This is a term that was originally associated with mainframe computers around the time of the arrival of the PC. Before that mainframes could be considered high, medium and low performance as they were the sole computing option.
Today HPC is more associated with clusters of servers that work together to act as one virtual super computer. And even in later years this has gone on to become known as grid computing.
HPC is significant because it can be used to study events that would otherwise be expensive to conduct in the real world (crashing a plane) or predicting the outcome of complex systems (the weather, stock prices).
Again it’s not a new concept, but hasn’t yet entered mainstream IT jargon.
As the price of technology drops and the need to model volatility increases, the demand for HPC will increase. Increasingly this will become the domain of Cloud service providers.
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In recent years, the increasing availability of commercial cloud computing resources has caught the attention of the high-performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing community. In order to predict the complex results, HPC will be expensive which is the reasonable fact.