HPC, or high-performance computing, is a workload class that runs on tightly packed clusters of servers, GPUs, and specialized interconnects to process large jobs quickly. It is used for scientific simulation, AI training, analytics, and other compute-heavy tasks where speed and scale matter more than a single machine’s performance.
In cyber security, HPC environments matter because they concentrate expensive compute, sensitive datasets, and privileged access in one place. Attackers may target them to steal research data, abuse GPU resources for cryptomining, or disrupt critical workloads with ransomware or misconfiguration. Defenses focus on strong identity and access control, network segmentation, patching, workload isolation, and monitoring for unusual job submission, data movement, or resource spikes.