What is HPC

• High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.

• A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.

• A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely so that in many respects they form a single computer.

What is Parallel Computing

• Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously.

• Operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently ("in parallel"). • The simultaneous execution of the same task

(split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain faster results.

What is MPI

• The MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard defines a software library used to turn serial applications into parallel ones that can run on distributed memory systems. Typically these systems are clusters of servers or networks of workstations.

• The standard was created by the MPI Forum (www.mpi-forum.org) in 1994 and is now the de facto standard for parallel programming.

What is MPI

• MPI-1 completed in May 1994

• MPI-2 completed in 1998 – parallel I/O – C++/F90 bindings – dynamic process management

• full MPI-2 implementations only recently

• MPI-2 features gradually added to MPI implementations