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If you are new to supercomputing, this page will guide you through the basic steps and concepts needed to interact with a supercomputer. |
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A supercomputer is a very complex hardware and software infrastructure comprising thousands of compute nodes, comparable to high-end desktop computers, connected together via a high-speed network, the interconnect. Compute nodes are equipped with powerful CPUs, a large amount of memory and often with hardware accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to carry on specialised operations. In addition, sophisticated storage infrastructures, that support the distributed filesystems accessible from all compute nodes, allow for reading and writing large volumes of data at a high rate. Where computing performance can be measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), a supercomputer can achieve dozens or hundreds of petaFLOPS (one petaFLOPS is a quadrillion FLOPS). It does this by executing code in parallel across the many compute units—CPUs and accelerators—that are available. A computer program must be written using parallel programming frameworks, enabling computational work to be distributed across CPU cores, to exploit the computational bandwidth of a supercomputer.
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