The chain of abstraction in High Performance Computing and simulation

摘要

Simulation on Supercomputers has become a standard way of getting insight both in research and in industrial applications like product design and engineering. The process of computing, however, is only a small part of a chain of steps that lead us from reality to simulation results. In recent years the level of performance has dramatically increased and has forced us to reconsider the foundations of supercomputing. In this paper we set out to discuss the state of the art in su-percomputing, the theoretical foundations of simulation and the implications that modern supercomputing architectures have on these foundations.