Thanks in advance.
In: Technology
Assuming you mean supercomputing?
It’s basically just a big, specialized computer. Like, really big. Not necessarily physically big (it’s not ENIAC, after all), but certainly quite a bit larger than your desktop.
When doing calculations on massive amounts of data, you will typically see computational resources arranged to work in parallel — that is, many processors (often purpose-built for this arrangement) will be set up so that the computing task is distributed across them in small parts so that each processor can handle a bit of the task at the same time; the results are then patched together toward the end. Specialized software is also purpose-built for this to take advantage of parallelization — the logic of *how* those many smaller processors take on a huge task in this way.
Specialized hardware for this can include high-performance GPUs (e.g. NVIDIA makes AI- and data science-oriented GPUs in the $12k+ range specifically for high-performance computing) which naturally build on the parallelization used internally in most commercial GPUs — just at a much larger scale. Specialized cooling equipment and racks/wiring/buses are also important for making the whole arrangement work as it should.
Latest Answers