Pesa with its fish seems to us to be the most powerful in the world, even those with a high-end i9 or Ryzen 9 also equipped with powerful graphics, there are problems that a classic PC cannot solve and that must be ‘they are for various day-to-day applications and technological and social progress. This is where HPC systems come in.
What does HPC mean?
The acronym HPC is the abbreviation of High Performance Computing, which in Spanish would be translated as high performance computing and under this generic term a whole world is included in computing. Although it is often used as a synonym for supercomputer, we generally call HPC systems made up of clusters of processing power found in large numbers and working in parallel to solve complex problems that require great speed.
The usefulness of HPC is wide, but outside the home market, since it is used today for professions such as the development of new drugs, the automated trading of stocks, the creation of simulations for future self-driving cars , etc. Therefore, it develops the solutions that we will see in the future on our PC.
Two examples of use
The first example is the need for automated cars after processing a large amount of information from radar sensors and GPS systems in real time to make crucial decisions in milliseconds. Getting the power of an HPC system or a supercomputer into the hands of a home user takes more than a decade. By the way, it now takes into account all traffic and you will see how far we are still from fully automated traffic.
Urban simulations are also used where the flow of daily movement of a city is represented to know whether urban plans will not affect the daily lives of citizens when planning future work or remodeling . Therefore, in general, they are used to solve problems that, due to data volume and speed, a conventional PC does not respond to.
Processors and special units
The ability to represent data in computing is limited by its number of bits, the greater the number of bits, the greater the precision. This is particularly important for the scientific and technical world, where a wrong rounded decimal can lead to a fatal error and ruin an experiment or render the simulation completely invalid. This is why the ability to move and execute data under a specific type is usually measured, it is 64-bit float or double precision.
In home systems, except for memory addressing, 32-bit is often used, due to the fact that it is good enough for average tasks and the fact that going to 64-bit means doubling the number of transistors to perform the greatest number of tasks. the processor either for execution tasks or for various registers.
This happens not only with CPUs, but also with GPUs, where HPC models have 64-bit or FP64 floating-point units, while gaming models find no such units. In addition, in recent times specialized units and accelerators are incorporated to quickly execute certain algorithms typical of this type of calculation. These improvements occur not only in terms of the processor, but also in the graphics chips and other supporting coprocessors.
