High Performance Computing most generally refers to the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve large problems in science, engineering, or business.

A HPC would have all the components which a server would have like Processors, Memory, GPU, High Speed Networking devices like 10G/40G Ethernet with either copper or fiber or Infiniband and Storage. The compute portion of the HPC cluster consists of a Head Node or Front End Node running scheduling and management software. Typical management tools are Bright Cluster Manager, ROCKS, OpenHPC etc.