Have you ever heard about High-Performance Computing or HPC, for short? Generally, HPC is a kind of technology that lets applications run faster. You might argue that today processors are so fast and you don’t need HPC. True and false. Single processor is not as fast as ones want it to be. Let me give you some example. Assuming you want to play a 2-player game, e.g., chess, and you want to win this game. How to win this game? It’s very easy to win any games. You have to do something that your opponent will have lowest chance to win the game. If you don’t have a computer, you must predict possible steps on your own. Actually, nobody predicts in action. They just believe in their experiences. If you play the game for so long, you will remember some patterns. Computer could help you a lot to simulate all possible playing to find the best solution for current state. Well, single processor or a few processors are not enough in most cases. For example, to play a chess game, you have 16 pieces on the board and your opponent has another 16 pieces. So you have to simulate 16^10 = 1,099,511,627,776 cases to find the best move for just 10 steps ahead. Suppose that your computer could simulate 10,000,000 cases in just a second. That means you could finish this simulation in 30 hours. Your opponent will never wait for that long. However, if you have 256 processors, it would take only 7 minutes.

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