Conceptual and Technical Challenges for High Performance Computing Claude Tadonki To cite this version: Claude Tadonki. Conceptual and Technical Challenges for High Performance Computing. 2020. hal- 02962355 HAL Id: hal-02962355 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02962355 Preprint submitted on 9 Oct 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Conceptual and Technical Challenges for High Performance Computing Claude, Tadonki Mines ParisTech – PSL Research University Paris, France Email:
[email protected] Abstract High Performance Computing (HPC) aims at providing reasonably fast computing solutions to scientific and real life problems. Many efforts have been made on the way to powerful supercomputers, including generic and customized configurations. The advent of multicore architectures is noticeable in the HPC history, because it has brought the underlying parallel programming concept into common considerations. At a larger scale, there is a keen interest in building or hosting frontline supercomputers; the Top500 ranking is a nice illustration of this (implicit) racing. Supercomputers, as well as ordinary computers, have fallen in price for years while gaining processing power. We clearly see that, what commonly springs up in mind when it comes to HPC is computer capability.