High performance computing differs from everyday computing in speed and processing power. An HPC system contains the same elements as a regular desktop computer, but enabling massive processing power. Today, most HPC workloads use massively distributed clusters of small machines rather than monolithic supercomputers.
Each machine in an HPC cluster, known as a node, typically contains multiple processors, each with two to four cores. A small HPC cluster might have four nodes with 16 cores, although most organizations are likely to use clusters containing 16-64 nodes and 64-256 cores.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a variety of services that support HPC scenarios. These include Amazon EC2, which is commonly used to run massively parallel workloads, and include specialized services like AWS ParallelCluster and FSx for Lustre which were purpose built for an HPC environment.