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Most of the time yes, HPC systems are shared among many users. Sometimes though the whole system (or near it) will be used in a single run. These are sometimes
by bitfilped 2y ago
Most of the time yes, HPC systems are shared among many users. Sometimes though the whole system (or near it) will be used in a single run. These are sometimes referred to as "hero runs" and while they're more common for benchmarking and burn-ins there are some tightly-coupled workloads that perform well in that style of execution. It really depends on a number of factors like the workloads being run, the number of users, and what the primary business purpose of the HPC resource is. Sites that have to run both types of jobs will typically allow any user to schedule jobs most of the time but then pre-reserve blocks of time for hero runs to take place where other user jobs are held until the primary scheduled run is over.
- Harmohit 2y agoThanks for the reply! Can you give some examples of these "hero runs"?
- magicalhippo 2y agoAt our university, at least when I studied there some 15 years ago, the whole cluster was occupied doing weather predictions each and every night. No point in staying up waiting for a job, it'd get rescheduled in the early morning at best. It wasn't the largest cluster around, IIRC 768 quad-core nodes, but I'm sure the meteorological department would find a way to utilize any extra capacity, so still requiring the whole thing all night.
- moomin 2y agoFeels like this might be an invariant in computer science. I once worked on an IBM/360. The majority of the compute was taken up by a single person who did weather simulation. An IBM/360 has laughably less compute than your phone.
- phinnaeus 2y agoIt might still have produced a better weather prediction than my phone, though /s
- nicklecompte 2y ago"Computational fluid dynamics is hard" seems like a true bona fide CS invariant.
- Keyframe 2y agoENIAC ran weather as well. It's a kind of numerical simulation that will always be in need of compute cycles. We'll need more of it as we go deeper into climate change.