Integrating Management Science Into the HPC Research Ecosystem

High performance computing (HPC) refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve problems in science, engineering, or business. HPC is usually realized by means of computer clusters or supercomputers. Interestingly, the June 2019 edition of the list of TOP500 supercomputer sites marks a milestone in its history because, for the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more. But looking at the development of single core performance reveals that it has stopped growing due to heat dissipation and energy consumption issues. As a result, substantial performance growth has started to come only from parallelism, which, in turn, means that sequential programs will not run faster on successive generations of hardware.