What is High Performance Computing?
HPC is a branch of computer science that focuses on the processing of large amounts of information and the software that runs on it.
To achieve this aim HPC uses supercomputers or clusters.
Supercomputers:
A supercomputer is a computer with a high processing capacity, famous supercomputers are Cray or IBM RoadRunner.
Supercomputers have more performance than a cluster, especially in I/O operations. But also they are more expensive.
Cluster:
Cluster computing is the technique of linking 2 or more computer into a network to take advantage of the parallel processing.
Clusters are cheaper than supercomputers as they can be built with common computers, maintenance is also more economical because the spare parts are common and they are available at very low cost.
As a consequence of this low costs, new scenarios for cluster usage have appeared.

Scenarios
From the beginning of HPC, the most common scenarios were related to gas/oil, climatology, finance, research, etc.
Now a day’s new industries are adopting HPC as a solution for their business needs. Digital cinema, 3D renderings are examples of these new scenarios.
Also companies like Ferrari are implementing HPC for predicting and preventing defects and gathering real-time information from vehicles on the road. You can find more information about Ferrari’s implementation here.
At the beginning, HPC implementations were very expensive and only governments or huge companies could cope that investment.
As I mentioned before, the cluster approach is cheaper and as a consequence of this, new scenarios are appearing. Good examples of these new scenarios are game servers and test environments.
Imagine your build server running in a clustered environment

Conclusions
Now we know a little bit more about HPC, the history and we also saw some of the typical scenarios and the new ones coming.
Implement an HPC cluster is not easy, neither impossible.
Next week I will post about Windows HPC Server 2008. Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed for high-end applications that require high performance computing clusters.
So stay tuned .. coming soon …

Thanks !