High performance scientific and engineering computing

In Douglas Adams' narrative, hyper-intelligent beings sought to understand their existence and the universe, leading to the creation of a supercomputer named Deep Thought. After millennia of computation, they were shocked to find that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was simply 42. In contrast, the questions faced by scientists and engineers tend to be simpler, yielding more reasonable answers. Human impatience has driven the development of high-performance computing techniques, resulting in significantly faster solutions. Over the past two decades, scientific and engineering computing has emerged as a crucial technology, shaping future research and development across various industries. Global development efforts have produced numerical methods enabling simulations previously deemed impossible. Today, the availability of supercomputers with Teraflop performance facilitates extensive computations with significant technical relevance, heralding a new era in engineering.