1.6) Nodes, Processors And Cores

In the context of HPC it is important to differentiate between nodes, processors and cores. Unfortunately, these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. To avoid any confusion, for the remainder of this course we will use the following definitions.

Nodes: Refers to the physical machine/server. In current systems, a node would typically include one or more processors, as well as memory and other hardware.

Processor: Refers to the central processing unit (CPU), which contains one or more cores.

Cores: Refers to the basic computation unit of the CPU. This is unit that carries out the actual computations.

So in essence, each compute node contains one or more processors/CPUs and each CPU will typically consist of one or more cores.