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.
ioprof, blktrace, and blkparse
Understanding how applications perform I/O is important not only because of the volume of data being written and read, but because the performance of some applications is dependent on how I/O is conducted. In this article we profile I/O at the block layer to help you make the best storage decisions.
Tool Your HPC Systems for Data Analytics
As data analytics workloads become more common, HPC administrators need to assess their hardware, software, and processes.
Graphite
Graphite converts confusing columns of time series data into handy diagrams, showing trends in operating system and application metrics at a glance.
A Better Builder
Developers fed up with cryptic Makefiles should take a look at the new Meson build system, which is simple to operate, offers scripting capabilities, integrates external test tools, and supports Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Parallel Shells
The most fundamental tool needed to administer an HPC system is a parallel shell, which allows you to run the same command on a series of nodes. In this article, we look at pdsh.
Metadata for Your Data
Understanding the proliferation of data in your filesystem is key to being an administrator. Understanding file sizes and file ages and their distribution helps you tune filesystems for performance and develop policies for data management.
Storage in the Cloud
When building cloud environments, you need more than just a scalable infrastructure; you also need a high-performance storage component. We look at Ceph, a distributed object store and filesystem that pairs well in the cloud with OpenStack.