HPC harnesses supercomputers, massively parallel clusters, and GPU acceleration to solve compute-intensive problems — from weather modelling and genomics to AI training and computational fluid dynamics — at speeds impossible on conventional hardware.
High-Performance Computing refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than a typical desktop computer or workstation. HPC clusters process huge multidimensional data sets, run simulation models at scale, and train large AI models — tasks requiring teraflops to exaflops of sustained compute throughput.
The defining traits of HPC are parallel processing (splitting work across thousands of cores), high-bandwidth interconnects (InfiniBand, NVIDIA Quantum-2), and fast storage tiers (NVMe, parallel file systems like Lustre and GPFS). Modern HPC increasingly converges with AI and cloud, creating hybrid on-prem + cloud HPC architectures.
InsideHPC's foundational explainer covering the definition, architecture, and purpose of HPC systems — nodes, interconnects, parallel file systems, and workload managers — written for engineers new to supercomputing.
Explores how HPC differs from standard enterprise computing, covering the roles of CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators, plus how workloads are scheduled and distributed across clusters.
Read on InsideHPCNetApp's HPC knowledge hub covering how high-speed storage (NVMe, parallel file systems) underpins computational workloads. Explains the relationship between compute and I/O bandwidth in HPC pipelines.
Read on NetAppThe National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee provides an academic view of HPC: architectures, use cases in research, and the role of national supercomputing centres in advancing science.
Read on NICSNetworkWorld examines whether HPC makes sense for your organisation — covering total cost of ownership, cloud HPC alternatives, use case thresholds, and how falling HPC costs are opening the technology to mid-market enterprises.
Read on NetworkWorldDell's full HPC portfolio: PowerEdge servers optimised for MPI workloads, NVIDIA GPU-accelerated nodes, Dell APEX HPC as-a-service, and purpose-built HPC storage. Covers configurations for AI, life sciences, and simulation workloads.
Visit Dell HPCAzure HPC offers on-demand supercomputing: H-series and N-series VMs, InfiniBand networking, Azure CycleCloud cluster manager, and tight integration with Azure AI services. Explore how to run MPI and GPU workloads in the cloud.
Visit Azure HPCNVIDIA's HPC platform: H100/H200 GPUs, CUDA, the HPC SDK, and NVLink/NVSwitch for multi-GPU scale-out. Covers GPU-accelerated HPC in genomics, fluid dynamics, molecular simulation, and large language model training.
Visit NVIDIA HPC