Intersect360 Research defines HPC as the use of servers, clusters, and supercomputers—plus associated software, tools, components, storage, and services—for scientific, engineering, or analytical tasks that are particularly intensive in computation, memory usage, or data management. HPC is used by scientists and engineers both in research and in production across industry, government, and academia. Within industry, HPC can frequently be distinguished from general business computing in that companies generally will use HPC applications to gain advantage in their core endeavors—e.g., finding oil, designing automobile parts, or protecting clients’ investments—as opposed to non-core endeavors such as payroll management or resource planning.

Characteristics of HPC applications include, but are not limited to: