Components of HPC Systems

Difference of HPC vs a conventional computer:

• organization, interconnectivity, and scale of the component resources.

• ability of the supporting software to manage the operation of the system at that scale.

• Scale: degree of physical and logical parallelism.

• APIs and algorithms that exploit and permit application parallelism and simultaneous operations.

  

• OS manages all aspects of the machine

• Compilers that translate application programs to machine-readable binary code.

• File systems that present a logical abstraction of mass storage and organize the data on mass storage devices.

• Software drivers of the I/O devices by which the computer communicates with the external world and users.

• tools that make user environments.

The most important component is a Balance between components. Components selected/tuned to fit user needs

Analogy with living being:

• Skeleton: mechanics (chassis, rack, etc.)
• Heart: Processor providing compute performance
• Brain: Memory / Storage
  • With many layers (caches, DRAM, SSD, HD, Tape)
• Nerve system: Network
  • Often more than one (MPI, Administration, I/O)
• Consciousness: Software
  • Including various middleware layers (node management, process management, MPI, etc.)
  • Open Source.