Gentle Introduction to Parallel Processing and Supercomputing

Authors: Janez Perš, Janez Križaj

Chapter Objectives

The primary objective of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental concepts of supercomputing and parallelism. While supercomputing is often perceived as an advanced and specialized field, the underlying principles of parallelism are broadly applicable across various domains, including everyday problem-solving and large-scale industrial applications.

By establishing connections between theoretical principles and real-world examples, this manual aims to make supercomputing more accessible to a wider audience. Rather than serving solely as a technical guide, it presents a structured exploration of parallelism and its significance in modern computational challenges. Readers will gain both a solid theoretical foundation and practical insights into how parallel computing enhances efficiency in solving complex problems.

Note: This chapter has been written with help of ChatGPT versions 4o, o1, o3-mini and o3-mini-high. The role of ChatGPT's LLM models was to transform unstructured narrative from voice transcripts to structured text, prettify and correct the flow of text, and provide translations EN-SI and vice versa. Photos have been generated using Dall-E 3.