Building The Best Of Both Worlds Between HPC And Enterprise Computing
HPCWire, Wednesday, August 30,2023
The standard architecture of high performance computing (HPC) cluster environments has remained largely static since the mid-1990s. Before this, supercomputers were built usually as one-off, highly specific architectures that were uniquely designed for that one machine-an approach which couldn't be massively scaled.
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While these machines were incredibly innovative, advancing needs in science and industry led to the development of the 'Message Passing Interface' (MPI) standard around 1994, and this changed the face of HPC at the time.
MPI allows for direct core-to-core communications between the CPU cores on a given single computer or across multiple networked computers at once, which essentially allows for the massive pooling of computational resources. Suddenly, thousands of compute nodes (with, thus, thousands of CPU cores) could be wired together and work in tandem on one simulation. This architecture, called the 'Beowulf cluster' - a flat set of compute nodes with a controller head node managing them - became the standard, static way that supercomputers have been designed since the development of MPI in the mid-1990s.