Why Memory Bandwidth Matters in HPC
Imagine having a powerful CPU with dozens of cores, but those cores spend time waiting for data from memory. The processor is ready to work, but the data isn't arriving quickly enough. This is one reason why adding more CPU cores doesn't always make an HPC application faster. These two terms sound similar, but they describe different things. Memory capacity is how much data can fit in memory. For example, a node might have 256 GB of RAM. Memory bandwidth is how quickly data can move between mem…