"High-Performance Computing," or HPC, involves a supercomputer consists of hundreds or thousands of smaller computers, connected with a high-speed network that work in parallel to perform calculations that are too large for a standalone computer or would be to complex to be solved within reasonable time.
The data center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz operates supercomputers that offer more than 53.000 CPU-cores with a peak performance of 2 PetaFLOPS (2 quadrillion floating point operations per second) along with 9 PB of storage on a parallel file server for scientists in rhineland-palatinate. This allows scientists from many disciplines like high-energy physics, meteorology, life-science and many more to achieve their competitive research objectives. Solving problems that might take days, weeks or month on a desktop computer might only minutes, hours or days on a supercomputer.