HPC Technologies from Scientific Computing to Big Data Applications

Recent advances in information technology and its widespread growth in the areas of business, engineering, medical and scientific studies have resulted in information explosion. High performance computing (HPC) systems are essential for solving scientific problems involving massive data using high computation power and high throughput networks. Due to the widespread growth of data in various fields, knowledge discovery and decision making is a challenging task and has resulted in the emerging trend of Big Data analytics. Big data is related to complex, diverse and massive data sets comprising of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Such data cannot be processed and analysed with the traditional database technologies. HPC systems can be extended to Big data applications for large-scale processing and analysis thus shifting the paradigm from traditional scientific computing domain to data intensive domain or Big data. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the evolution and principles starting from scientific computing to present Big Data analytics.