Introductory Chapter: High Performance Parallel Computing

Abstract

High performance computing research had an interesting journey from the year 1972 to this day. In the initial years HPC was considered synonyms with supercomputing and was accessible to the scientists and researchers who worked in the domain of aeronautics, automobiles, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, particle physics, weather forecasting, etc. to name a few. Next came a phase where the term supercomputing gradually was replaced by high performance computing and the computing power gradually shifted to PCs in the form of multicore processors for various reasons. This was the time when lot of researchers saw benefit in parallelizing their applications achieving speedups, scale ups and robustness. This was possible because of concepts like Message passing interface, OpenMP, etc. which got evolved. Lot of research was carried out related to HPC systems architecture, computational models, parallel algorithms, and performance optimization, as a result of which renewed interest was created in parallel computing for HPC. This interest was also sustained because of: