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HPC for Business
Ask a non-IT savvy managing director to explain the term High Performance Computer (HPC) and with a hint of sarcasm they will probably tell you that it is, as the name suggests, a high performance computer.
Those in the know might even reference a more common, alternative name, a ‘supercomputer’.
Ask for a few practical examples and they may well recall Deep Blue, IBM’s powerful (and physically large) computer which, back in the 90’s beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a game of chess.
A HPC is of course a high performance computer – at least that bit is correct – built to process computational data and to help solve specific or a collection of problems.
However, on the whole, today’s HPCs are no longer the headline grabbing, chess-playing physical behemoths of old.
Built using low-cost, commodity components (think PC’s, servers, workstations or even games-consoles) linked together to create powerful machines, a single HPC can now fill little more than a small filing cabinet sized space.
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