# K Overview: HPC Knowledge

The theoretical knowledge of HPC provides the background to understand how supercomputers and HPC environments operate.
This enables practitioners to effectively use such environments.

## Learning objectives
  * Explain the hardware, software, and operation of HPC systems.
  * Construct and judge simple performance models for systems and applications.
  * Understand that there are performance frontiers.
  * Explain why it is a special challenge to achieve good speedups and good efficiencies if the number of processing elements is steadily increased.
  * Compare different paradigms for the parallelization of applications.
  * Construct and execute an HPC workflow on an HPC system.
  * Comprehend job scheduling principles.
  * Apply a cost model to compute the costs for running a workflow on an HPC system.

## Subskills