High Performance Computing (HPC) Dusan Jolovic Jelena Karapetrovic Tracey Fernandez

Who are we? ICT Supercomputing Team at NMSU Spreading the word about the supercomputer possibilities Support faculty and student efforts on using supercomputer

What is HPC? Can be high performance computing or high performance computer It is aggregation of computing power Delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a regular desktop – if you use it properly Can solve large problems in science, engineering, business

Examples: Astronomy Astrophysics Human genome work Imaging and rendering Earthquake wave propagation Nuclear reactor, weapon design Protein Structures Petroleum exploration Intensive transportation modeling Climate modeling Ocean modeling Teaching, etc.

Another word – supercomputing The cost can be very high – but free for students and faculty Never played with it before? Need to learn basics Elements Processors Memory Disk OS (mostly Linux)

Point of having HPC? Individual computers in a cluster – Nodes Individual nodes can work together, talk to each other Faster problem solving

Some facts about HPC Introduced in 1960s First supercomputer credited to University of Manchester and the Control Data Corporation (CDC) Used innovative designs and parallelism to achieve super performances

The concept of parallel computing One processor in your desktop or laptop can give you output in X hours X>10 Why not use several (Y) processors, and get the results in X<1? Supercomputing allows using several processors to ‘attack’ a problem

Each processor works on one part of the problem Processors can exchange information with other processors graphic by: San Diego Supercomputing Center

Why parallel computing? A single processor has limitations in terms of: Memory Speed Performance It solves problems that cannot fit to a single CPU’s memory space Solve problems that cannot be solved in a reasonable time Solve problems at finer resolution Model any phenomena more realistically

Measurements and energy Performance of a supercomputer is measured in ‘floating-point’ operations per second (FLOPS) Supercomputers consume large amounts of power They produce a lot of heat Heat management is a major issue in complex electronic devices Heat reduces the lifetime of system components Cooling systems are highly important in rooms where supercomputers are stored NMSU has a user-access room to house and cool self-owned servers Ask us if you would like more information!

Operating Systems Linux and Linux derivatives (Red Hat, CentOS, etc.) Linux can be customized and tailored It has to be lightweight and secure

Cloud Computing & HPC Internet based computing On demand access Can cut infrastructure costs (no purchase of servers necessary) Aims to provide HPC as a service Several issues: network latency, multi tenancy of resources, virtualization overhead

Top supercomputers worldwide Sunway TaihuLight (China) – 10,649,600 CPUY cores, $300m NUDT Tianhe-2 (China) Cray Titan (US) IBM Sequoia (US)

Does NMSU have a supercomputer? NMSU has Joker supercomputer Joker has 238 cores, it runs on CentOS 7 Each core has 4GB RAM CentOS is Linux based OS To submit jobs on Joker you have to use Slurm scheduler To learn more about Slurm – check out the next presentation on Intro to Joker

Do you need Joker? How time consuming are the jobs you execute on your desktop/laptop? You need to register for Joker: https://hpc.nmsu.edu/account-request/ What software do you use? You can submit software installation request Some currently available software: Matlab, Gaussian, R, Python

More on HPC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_i5kOlj_UU Do I need specific knowledge to run my experiments on a supercomputer? Who to ask for support? Where to search for solutions? What do I need to know? Can someone else run experiments for me?

Useful links How to use HPC https://hpc.nmsu.edu/hpc-user-guide/ Who is in the team? https://cia.nmsu.edu/meet-the-team/ Other useful resources https://cia.nmsu.edu/other-resources/

External resources Summit, Colorado State New Mexico Consortium https://www.acns.colostate.edu/hpc/ New Mexico Consortium http://newmexicoconsortium.org/ University of New Mexico https://www.carc.unm.edu/ Data Storage Facility http://www.cyverse.org/

Try it! HPC-team We can help you start submitting your jobs on supercomputers Want superpowers? This is the closest you can get (most probably )