* 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

• Currently, 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

• Group of tightly coupled (usually with a high performance interconnect) computers that work together

• Commodity based cluster COTS (commodity-off-the-shelf) components
• Linux, Intel/AMD

• Loosely coupled cluster (no high performance interconnect)

• 32 bits
• Significand of 24 bits
• Exponent of 7 bits
• 1 sign bit

• 64 bits
• Significand of 52 bits
• Exponent of 11 bits
• 1 sign bit