This document discusses high performance computing and introduces some basic concepts. It explains that computer performance has increased dramatically over the last five decades due to Moore's law, where transistor density doubles every 18 months. While Moore's law is not a true law, it has held for nearly 50 years. The document also discusses how performance improvements have shifted from advances in manufacturing technology to architectural and organizational innovations since the 1980s. It introduces concepts like computer architecture, instruction set architecture, and Amdahl's law, which quantifies the overall performance gain that can be achieved by improving part of a computation.