Overview of State-of-the-art High-performance Computer Systems

The power of high performance computing systems is largely obtained by executing several computations in parallel. Full use of these systems can only be made if application programs are implicitly or explicitly characterized by a sufficient amount of parallelism of the kind the computing system offers. When programming high performance systems one has not only to consider the structure of the hardware but also the structure of their operating systems and the so called programming models given by programming languages and communications libraries. Therefore, at first we give an overview over the essential features of state of the art hardware followed by a discussion of their operating systems. Finally we address the influence of the different programming models.