From Deepseek.
- Compute-Bound: A problem is compute-bound when the speed of the calculation is limited by the CPU's (or GPU's) ability to perform mathematical operations. The processors are constantly working, and the bottleneck is their processing speed. They are waiting for nothing.
- I/O-Bound: A problem is I/O-bound (Input/Output bound) when the speed of the calculation is limited by the system's ability to read data from or write data to storage (disks, SSDs) or to transfer data between parts of the system (e.g., between nodes over a network, or between RAM and a processor). The processors are often idle, waiting for data to arrive.
The core idea of supercomputing is to solve a big problem faster by breaking it into smaller pieces and solving those pieces simultaneously on thousands of processors (CPUs/GPUs).