Increasing productivity and getting more done with current technology and systems is at the heart of many business plans and improvement goals. One way to do this is to upgrade your current individual computer network to HPC systems.
The Uses of HPC
HPC systems, or high performance computing systems, are used in a wide variety of different businesses and industries, particularly where there is a high demand for computing ability with a business or an organization. This is true for different businesses including financial institutes, engineering companies, Fortune 500 companies, medical research facilities, and laboratories as well as most government offices and agencies.
The more that your business relies on computers, the more important HPC systems will be to consider when increasing productivity, and efficiency is your goal. Through these systems all those individual computers and workstations are linked and operate in unison, turning the single computers into one large “supercomputer”. There is also the option to use a supercomputer or server as your main computing system with the same positive impact.
The Really Big Picture
With HPC services in place in an organization or business, it is possible to have the effects of these supercomputers without the major cost of some of the largest of the supercomputers. With options today it is possible to achieve the same outcome of some of the world’s largest supercomputers at a price that works for many organizations.
Basically, within
- HPC systems
, each computer is known as a node. These nodes are all linked together through a high-speed connection, a local area network (LAN), and there is software that manages all the nodes on the system as one.
In most HPC configurations, all the nodes are identical in both hardware and software, which allows the overarching cluster software to assign “work” to each node throughout the cluster. This ensures that data is processed as rapidly as possible as the work balances out, allowing each node to work to maximum capacity.
Is it Worth It?
When a business is data driven, or when there are ongoing high demands on specific individual computer or workstations that impact the productivity of the organization or business, moving to high performance computing is a very good choice.
In addition, for businesses that are rapidly growing and expanding, using HPC systems can allow for current computer networks to handle more data through balancing out the load across the system. As these can be scaled up over time, they are a good option to consider at any point in an organization’s growth.
