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Programming a supercomputer feel like having to write a program that uses thousands of computers, that’s about it. Some supercomputer vendors have specialized
by javierluraschi 7y ago
Programming a supercomputer feel like having to write a program that uses thousands of computers, that’s about it.
Some supercomputer vendors have specialized software running, but others also support open source distributed computing frameworks like Apache Spark.
If you are wondering why we call them supercomputers, it’s because it’s not as easy to just buy thousands of computers. Even easy things like shipping, installation and power consumption becomes a problem on its own. So rather than buying thousands of machines it pays off to buy them through a supercomputer vendor that will optimize space, power consumption, install cluster management software, etc.
So if you want to get started, I would just get a small n-node cluster from any cloud provider and get better at writing distributed code.
- closeparen 7y agoI deploy to hundreds of machines at work, but that is just load balanced RPC and message queue processing workloads, interacting with other load balanced RPC and message queue workloads. The little information I can make sense of about “HPC” does not seem familiar through that lens.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoBased on a very shallow reading of Infiniband, I think some of the interconnects of supercomputers are essentially DMA-based rather than network-based. So it's like writing something massively multithreaded (your barrier is one step above shared memory) versus multihosted. I could be completely 100% wrong.