[jandrewrogers]

They are used to do large-scale high-resolution analysis or simulation of complex systems in the physical world. The codes typically run on the bare metal with careful control of resource affinity, often C++ these days.

They aren't just used for global-scale geophysical processes like weather and climate or complex physics simulations. For example, oil companies rent time to analytically reconstruct the 3-dimensional structure of what's underneath the surface of the Earth from seismic recordings.

[quadruplebond]

What do you mean bare metal? Because all of the big DOE computers are running Linux. Users will probably use hardware specific libraries (like CUDA/ROCm) and occasionally write some hardware specific asm, but none of the big computers are running without a POSIX OS.

[cozzyd]

I think they mean not in a VM, and instead using some job manager like slurm or condor. Typically users wouldn't have superuser privligles precluding the use of thigns like docker, which is why Singularity exists.