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

• 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.