Parallel I/O
Understanding the I/O pattern of your application is the starting point for improving its I/O performance, especially if I/O is a fairly large part of your application’s run time.
Directive Coding
With directive coding, you annotate code with compiler directives to take advantage of parallelism or accelerators. The two primary standards are OpenACC and OpenMP.
New Release of Lmod Environment Modules System
Lmod is an indispensable tool for high-performance computing. With the new release of version 6, now is a good time to review Lmod and look at its new capabilities.
The Fundamentals of Building an HPC Cluster
High-performance computing begins with understanding what you are trying to achieve, the assumptions you make to get there, and the resulting boundaries and limitations imposed on you and your HPC system.
Encrypting Files
Encrypting your data is becoming increasingly important, but you don’t always have to use an encrypted filesystem. Sometimes just encrypting files is enough.
Virtuous Benchmarks: Using Benchmarks to Your Advantage
Benchmarks have been misused by both users and vendors for many years, but they don’t have to be the evil creature we all think them to be.
Monitoring with Nmon
HPC administrators sometimes assume that if all nodes are functioning, the system is fine. However, the most common issue users have is poor or unexpected application performance. In this case, you need a simple tool to help you understand what’s happening on the nodes.
Stat-like command-line tools for admins
ASCII tools can be life savers when they provide the only access you have to a misbehaving server. However, once you're on the node what do you do? In this article, we look at stat-like tools: vmstat, dstat, and mpstat.