HPC Workload, Workload

A high-level term for what’s done on an HPC cluster. As in, “We’re using our cluster primarily to run computational fluid dynamics workloads, but we have a few other research groups that are running some genomics workloads on it as well.”

The distinction between a “workload” and a “workflow” is that “workload” is more generically used as a catch-all for the different tasks a given field might be using HPC resources for, while a “workflow” is usually a specific set of codified computational jobs accomplishing one of those specific tasks within a given field. So, as with the above example, if “we’re using our cluster primarily to run computational fluid dynamics workloads,” then one may expect to see a wide variety of different computational fluid dynamics workflows running in that environment.