I agree with most of what Kyle said. The problem is that there is no precise definition of “HPC”. I just watched the “Analyst Crossfire” video from ISC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVP0IdiT3iI); the 4 panelists didn’t even agree on exactly what “HPC” means. My point is that what used to be considered “HPC” is now mainstream — so is that no longer “HPC”? I’m sure different people have different answers to that.

The overall theme of my post is: I’m seeing trickle-down of traditional / bleeding-edge “HPC” technologies into everyday usage. They’re parallel forms of computation, in one way or another — not just having the compiler automatically take advantage of vector processors, but actual parallel programming. Sometimes it’s just threads on a single machine, sometimes it’s spread out across a cluster. But Joe and Jane User are starting to use techniques that used to be the sole domain of the bleeding edge of high performance computing.

And that’s what I think is a Good Thing.

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But I also argue that, potentially as a side-effect, HPC has also come to the mass market. “Normal” job computational requirements are definitely what used to be considered “HPC” only a short time ago (weather simulations, financial projections, high-detail rendering, etc.). That’s what I was trying to refer to in the last few lines of the post: perhaps we need new terminology such as “low end HPC” and “high end HPC,” or somesuch.

Additionally, if you look at what companies like Microsoft are doing, they really are trying to bring more than just “simple” multi-threaded/multi-core parallelism to market for the common user. They’re trying to bring cluster-powered computation to Excel spreadsheets (and the like). Perhaps the line between “parallelism” and “HPC” is getting grey, or perhaps the definition of “HPC” itself is pretty grey…

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