What is Advanced Computing?

It is a set of high-performance and processing computational and technological resources that facilitate cooperation, progress, and knowledge sharing. It focuses on infrastructure supercomputing and a range of computational models serving research and innovation; developed by people high-value with strong advanced computer skills; and requires the implementation of a info-structure of public policies to bridge the gap between infrastructure and people, in order to promote the creation of high-value services and software.

Computational models

  • HPC
  • HTC
  • Cloud Computing
  • Quantum Computing

HPC – High Performance Computing

Each HPC architecture [1] consists of the following elements:

  1. A set of compute nodes (compute nodes) that operate together and are temporarily dedicated to a single application, which together can execute at least 40 x 10^12 [[2]] floating-point operations, strongly dependent on each other, every second, executed on generic, non-specialized microprocessors [[3]].
  2. A file system accessible from each compute node at a shared throughput of at least 40 Gbps [[4]] with multiple simultaneous access streams [[5]] in each compute node.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPC [2] 40 Tera-FLOP [3] An example of a class of specialized processors are GPUs [4] 1Gbps = 1 Gigabit per second [5] File system parallel, such as Lustre or BeeGFS

HTC – High Throughput Computing

Each HTC architecture [1] consists of the following elements:

  1. A set of compute nodes (compute nodes) distributed [[2]] or concentrated, normally shared between several applications, in virtualization or containerization mode.
  2. A file system accessible from each compute node.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-throughput_computing [2] Across multiple geographically distributed data centers

Cloud Computing

Each architecture Cloud Computing[1] consists of the following elements:

  1. A set of compute nodes (compute nodes) shared by several users and applications, made available in a system of self-service with maximum quotas, through a layer of virtualization software in cloud computing IaaS [[2]].
  2. Virtual servers (VM – Virtual Machines) made available, will access the virtual disk through devices local files, or mounting a remote file system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing [2] See the definition of cloud IaaS at https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is among the most far-reaching and challenging technologies. Based on quantum bits that can be both zero and one simultaneously and instantaneous correlations between devices, a quantum computer acts as a massively parallel device with an exponentially large number of calculations occurring all at once. Many algorithms already utilize this computational modality, which will allow solving problems that even the most powerful classical supercomputers would never solve or would take hundreds of years to solve. To learn more, visit “Quantum manifesto”