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

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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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)

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

7. 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

8. 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

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

10. 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

11. 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!

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

13. 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

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

15. 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

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

17. 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?

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

19. External resources Summit, Colorado State New Mexico Consortium
New Mexico Consortium
University of New Mexico
Data Storage Facility

20. 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 )