What is HPC?

High Performance Computing(HPC) is becoming a trending term in Computer Science. Here is my view or definition of HPC in layman words.

As humans we are bound by the performance metric in any activity that we pursue, constantly aiming to improve this metric. So it is unsurprising that computing devices these days are also striving to give their best performance.

In my view, HPC can be defined as any activity that reduces computation time of a process on a computing device and accordingly shows signs of improvement(large or small-scale) in performance. Even the smallest step of reducing unecessary iterations in a for-loop can be a simple step towards high performance computing. A tool which emphasises this : Multrix.

So HPC doesn’t just refer to large scale parallel architectures or huge clusters of CPUs and GPUs with millions of cores. The simple small-scale optimizations that when implemented conserve our computation resources are the activities that define and drive HPC.