# What is high-performance computing (HPC)?

What high-performance computing is, how it differs from ordinary cloud computing, and when a workload actually needs it.

Source: https://university.eugo.io/what-is-hpc

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High-performance computing (HPC) is the practice of splitting one large computation across many machines that work on it simultaneously, then combining the results. A job that would take a single computer three weeks can finish in an afternoon. The technique is decades old; what changed recently is who can get at it. HPC used to mean owning a supercomputer, and is now available as a service requested for the length of one run.

## Common questions

### What is high-performance computing?

Running one computation across many machines at once, so it finishes in hours rather than weeks. The work is split into pieces, each machine takes some, and the results are combined. It is the technique behind climate models, genome analysis, crash simulation, and training large neural networks.

### What is the difference between HPC and cloud computing?

Cloud computing is about who owns the machines; HPC is about how many of them work on one problem together. They are orthogonal. You can run HPC on your own hardware or in the cloud, and most cloud usage is not HPC at all. HPC as a service is the overlap: HPC delivered on demand rather than from a machine room you bought.

### Do I need a supercomputer?

Probably not one you own. If a job takes longer than you can wait, runs out of memory, or you are batching work overnight that you would rather see in minutes, you need HPC. But that is now something you request for the length of a run rather than something you procure.

### How much faster is HPC than a single machine?

It depends almost entirely on whether the work divides. Work that splits cleanly scales close to linearly with the number of workers, so 32 machines can approach 30x. Work that is waiting on storage rather than computing barely improves at all, no matter how many machines you add. Diagnosing which case you are in comes before scaling anything.

### What is HPCaaS?

High-performance computing consumed as a service: you request compute for one run and stop paying when it ends. No hardware procurement, no capacity planning, and no job queue to wait in, because you are not sharing a fixed pool of machines with other users.

### Do I have to rewrite my code to use HPC?

Traditionally yes, and that is the historical barrier. Classic HPC meant a batch submission script and often MPI. On Eugo it is a decorator on a function you already wrote: the body is unchanged Python, and the call site returns a handle instead of a value.

### Is HPC only for scientists?

No. The largest growth is commercial: financial modeling, geospatial pipelines, ML training and inference, and any data workload that outgrew a single machine are all HPC problems, whether or not the people running them use the term.