HPC 101 - Introduction

Welcome to the UFS HPC. The HPC 101 series of documents are designed to provided a primer to new users to familiarize themselves with the relevant terminology and skills required to navigate the HPC resources provided by the UFS HPC.

Before getting to the utilization part of this series, it is first important for users to know and broadly understand what an HPC is.

Definition of an HPC

First, the abbreviation HPC denotes High Performance Computing. The term may refer to the field of using distributed computing resources to accelerate different workloads, or it may refer to the combination of distributed computing resources (hardware and software) provided by an institution such as the University of the Free State, i.e. the UFS HPC.