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Is Your HPC System Fully Optimized? + Live Chat
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This is a duplicate of a high-performance computing blog I authored for Cray, originally published at the Cray Blog Site.
Let’s talk operating systems…
Take a step back and look at the systems you have in place to run applications and workloads that require high core counts to get the job done. (You know, jobs like fraud detection, seismic analysis, cancer research, patient data analysis, weather prediction, and more — jobs that can really take your organization to the next level, trying to solve seriously tough challenges.)
You’re likely running a cutting-edge processor, looking to take advantage of the latest and greatest innovations in compute processing and floating-point calculations. The models you’re running are complex, pushing the bounds of math and science, so you want the best you can get when it comes to processor power.
You’re probably looking at a high-performance file system to ensure that your gigantic swaths of data can be accessed, processed, and stored so your outcomes tell the full story.
You’re most likely using a network interconnect that can really move so that your system can hum, connecting data and processing in a seamless manner, with limited performance hit.
We can go on and on, in terms of drive types, memory choices, and even cabling decisions. The more optimized your system can be for a high-performance workload, the faster and better your results will be.
But what about your software stack, starting with your operating system?
Live tweet chat
Join us for a live online chat at 10 a.m. Tuesday, June 19 — “Do you need an HPC-optimized OS?” — to learn about optimizing your HPC workloads with an improved OS. You can participate using a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account and the hashtag #GetHPCOS.
Sunny Sundstrom and I will discuss what tools to use to customize the environment for your user base, whether there’s value in packaging things together, and what the underlying OS really means for you.
Bring your questions or offer your own expertise.
Moment of truth time
Are you optimizing your system at the operating environment level, like you are across the rest of your system? Are you squeezing every bit of performance benefit out of your system, even when it comes to the OS?
Think about it — if you’re searching for an additional area to drive a performance edge, the operating system could be just the place to look:
- There are methods to allocate jobs to run on specific nodes tuned for specific workloads — driven at the OS level.
- You can deploy a lighter-weight OS instance on your working compute node to avoid unnecessarily bringing down the performance of the job, while ensuring your service nodes can adequately run and manage your system.
- You can decrease jitter of the overall system by using the OS as your control point.
All of this at the OS level.
Take a deeper look at your overall system, including the software stack, and specifically your operating system and operating environment.
You may be pleasantly surprised to find that you can drive even more performance in a seemingly unexpected place.
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
Add our 6/19 tweet chat to your calendar for further discussion.
8 Letters to HPC Success – SOFTWARE
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This is a duplicate of a high-performance computing blog I authored for Cray, originally published at the Cray Blog Site.
These days, more and more organizations are using high-performance computing systems to seek out answers to big questions. From detecting fraud in financial transactions within milliseconds, to scouring the universe for life, to working toward a cure for cancer, the applications working on these questions require an infrastructure that allows for numerous cores, large swaths of data, and rapid results.
These systems are carefully designed to optimize application performance at scale. Processors, memory, storage, networking — all carefully selected and implemented to drive optimal performance.
However, far too many vendors ignore the impact of another key area of the infrastructure stack … the SOFTWARE.
Software is a key component and a remarkable enabler for gleaning optimal performance from an application and a system. And that means getting that much more performance out of your system, getting you to insights and answers faster.
Along with fine-tuning your hardware infrastructure, imagine the impacts of an HPC-optimized software OS and operating environment. You could witness the impact of lower jitter, more focused intelligence built into to the various levels of the hardware system, and greater levels of job deployment flexibility.
Or think of the impact of a unified, cross-processor programming environment, designed to help your application developers get the most of their HPC applications — a programming interface that gives them broad control and flexibility when it comes to porting, compiling, debugging and optimizing the applications that get you results.
These software applications are the reality for today’s Cray customers.
From the Cray Linux® Environment to the Cray Programming Environment, from powerful systems management to amazing storage telemetry, and from emerging cloud capabilities to effective analytics packages, we enable our customers to take performance to the next level with our comprehensive software portfolio.
Here at Cray, we understand the power of the software stack and have been committed to building the best for several decades. In addition to our work with our ecosystem of software partners and open source communities, we remain big believers in rolling up our sleeves and getting into the code. Our software engineering teams work hand in hand with our system hardware teams to ensure Cray systems are optimized at all levels, and find ways to extend the reach of our partners and open-source projects.
And there’s no slowing down in sight.
It’s time you leveraged the power of HPC-optimized software to answer the big questions you have in your business.
In the coming weeks we’ll bring you a more in-depth look at Cray’s HPC-optimized software stack with blogs, videos, webinars and other helpful tools so that you can maximize the performance of your Cray systems and applications.
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 