Introduction to Computing and HiPerGator

What is a computer?

https://pollev.com/mattg252

What is a SUPERcomputer?

https://pollev.com/mattg252 Closeup of a Lenovo logo on a rack of HiPerGator 3 computers

Parallel Computing

Photo of an early Beowolf cluster. Several desktop computers on a bookshelf.

How to scale programs?

  • icon of a CPUUntil early 2000s, computer CPUs were single-core
  • Most computers had one CPU
  • Only way to scale beyond a core, was networked computers
    • Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming
    • Still used today

How to scale programs?

  • icon of a multicore-CPUMulticore CPUs enable scaling within a server
    • Access to shared memory is one key advantage!
Photo of a memory chip