What is a HPC

Scientific computing generally revolves around researchers performing complex calculations as fast as possible. The super computers of the 70s, 80s and 90s were custom built to provide researchers with access to a machine with more memory (RAM) and CPU cores than the small, slow and expensive desktop computers of the era. These large machines such as those build by Cray and SGI were expensive and took a huge amount of space, power and cooling.

In the early 2000s, the first multi core processors were released which dramatically changed the ability for users to being to take advantage of parallelisation when performing calculations. Today, the term High Performance Computing (HPC) is user to describe a form of supercomputing based upon off the shelf hardware. HPC clusters are often built from the same hardware as that which is found in high-end desktop workstations or web servers.