Is Supercomputing Just About Performance?

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Our own Andrew Jones has written an interesting perspective piece for ZDNet on the “real” meaning of ‘P’ in HPC.  As we as an industry jump at the notion to immediately expand ‘HPC’ to High Performance Computing, Andrew postulates that there is more to ‘P’ than just performance.

While I stand firm on ‘P equals performance’, I support the focus on productivity. Indeed, I have held forth on the topic on a number of occasions over the past few years.

The term ‘high-productivity computing’ tries to recognise that performance matters across the whole ecosystem of HPC, not just the hardware and software deployed.

I would most certainly agree.  We all sometimes forget that High Performance/Productivity Computing is an “enabler industry.”  We enable those in other scientific/industrial disciplines to perform their work faster, safer and [hopefully] more efficiently.  Thus we arrive at one of the paramount goals of HPC, “Perform more work per unit time per unit dollar.”  [For Andrew’s sake, Pounds are ok too..]

Head over to ZDNet/UK and read Andrew’s full article here.

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