The use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly.

A system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. Some supercomputers work at over half a petaflop or 10¹⁵ floating-point operations per second.

Number of floating point operations per clock cycle

Peak Flops, the theoretical measure of floating point potential

As measured by LinPack (http://www.top500.org)

High Performance Interconnect

This usually means Infiniband

Originally born out of high performance computing

Enhancing the capability of the network of things rather than making applications run faster