The Difference
- Personal computer: A general-purpose machine for everyday individual use.
- Workstation: A powerful single-user computer for demanding professional work, such as engineering design or visualization.
- Server: A computer that provides applications, data, or other services to users and machines over a network.
- HPC system: Computing resources configured to solve demanding problems efficiently, often by dividing work across multiple processors or nodes [1, 2].
- Supercomputer: A system at the leading edge of computing scale and performance, commonly built as a large HPC cluster [1].
These are not mutually exclusive categories. A server can be a node in an HPC cluster, and HPC can run on one machine or many. A large HPC system may be called a supercomputer; an HPC cluster is not automatically one.
For MEEP simulations, a workstation is useful for writing code and testing small models. Larger simulations can be sent to an HPC cluster to use more compute resources.