HPC stands for High Performance Computing. It can also be used as a synonym for supercomputing.

An HPC infrastructure has the following characteristics:

• A huge amount of computation resources
• Advanced computation capabilities
• Fast interconnections
• Parallel processing
• CPU/GPU computation
• Advanced file systems
• Enhanced securities
• Large storage.

HPC is widely used for scientific computation, application development, machine learning/deep learning, data analysis, and so on.

The primary value of HPC is giving users access to much more powerful computational resources than a laptop. While the laptop may be great for word processing, social media, streaming music and videos, laptops have a limited amount of memory. Bringing together multiple computers at once allows to complete processing in a more effective and efficient manner. As an example, if a company was trying to build a model to predict a specific fish in a range of images, the training for the model could take years on a laptop, but the same model development could be completed within weeks on specifically designed computing HPC infrastructure.