Welcome to Part 1

Transcript

0:12 - In this first week after a brief introduction to the kinds of applications supercomputing has, we’ll largely concentrate on supercomputer hardware. Starting from how a modern computer processor works, we’ll explain where supercomputers get their enormous computing power from, why they’re also called parallel computers, and how we quantify and measure their speed. We’ll also cover some history to illustrate how far we’ve come since the birth of modern supercomputing in the early 90s, and show you some examples of current state-of-the-art machines. We’ll also introduce some key terminology that you’ll need to understand the rest of the course. So enjoy.

In this very short video Dr. David Henty talks about what is to come in part 1.

The main aim of part 1 is to give you a general idea of what supercomputers are and why we need them. It will also introduce you to the terminology required to understand what supercomputing is all about.