What is High Performance Computing?

Do you work in high performance computing? Struggle to explain what that is to your spouse/ mother/ kids/ boss/ investors/ board of directors? Point them to this.

I bumped into an old friend recently and one of the first things he said to me was “I see your posts regularly on LinkedIn, haven’t got a clue what on earth you’re talking about!”. He wasn’t the first person to say that to me either. Sometimes my family ask me what it is that I do, and I think I’m yet to give them an explanation they understood… so I figured I’d give it another go today. 

But let’s be honest, to most people computers are boring, unless maybe it’s the latest iPhone. Who am I kidding those are boring too. Maybe a trifold Android device then. So, let’s mix things up a little. 

Imagine you have three mountainous piles of sand, cement and aggregate, The ingredients for concrete. You need to turn them into a tower that reaches the moon. Those raw ingredients are your workload, or perhaps more correctly, your input data.

You clearly need construction workers to do this. Those are your CPUs. You have some that are on payroll (in a European country) and those are like your on prem capacity. Then you have a bunch of zero hours contractors and that’s like your cloud capacity. Finally, you have some that are illegal immigrants, super cheap but liable to disappear with no notice, that’s your spot capacity.

The thing that co-ordinates all of these different types of workers, decided who does which bit of work, your project manager really, well that’s your scheduler. Your Slurm, your LSF, your PBS if you will. 

Your HR department, the thing that’s responsible for bringing in more workers or letting them go once the job is done? That’s your orchestrator. Your Cycle Cloud, your Host Factory  and the like. If all you have are payrolled staff this function isn’t really that important but if you’re using a lot of contract workers and illegal immigrants with a high turnover this becomes critical to ensure you have a ready supply of the correct workforce.

The buckets, wheelbarrows and trucks used to transport the raw materials by the workers, well that’s your network (100Mbit, 10Gbit and Infiniband respectively).

So that’s HPC in a nutshell. Turning a bunch of raw commodity bits into a supercomputer.