How Linux and Beowulf Drove Desktop Supercomputing

Open source software and tools, the Beowulf Project, and communities changed the face of high-performance computing.

A Brief History of Supercomputers

This first article of a series looks at the forces that have driven desktop supercomputing, beginning with the history of PC and supercomputing processors through the 1990s into the early 2000s.

Remora – Resource Monitoring for Users

Remora provides per-node and per-job resource utilization data that can be used to understand how an application performs on the system through a combination of profiling and system monitoring.

mpi4py – High-Performance Distributed Python

Tap into the power of MPI to run distributed Python code on your laptop at scale.

Why Good Applications Don’t Scale

You have parallelized your serial application, but as you use more cores you are not seeing any improvement in performance. What gives?

SSHFS for Shared Storage

SSHFS is often overlooked as an HPC shared filesystem solution.

SMART Devices

Most storage devices have SMART capability, but can it help you predict failure? We look at ways to take advantage of this built-in monitoring technology with the smartctl utility from the Linux smartmontools package.

Caching with CacheFS

For read-heavy workloads, CacheFS is a great caching mechanism for NFS and AFS.

Bashtop, a Gorgeous Top-like Tool

Fairly recently, a new top-like tool has received quite a bit of attention: bashtop, like other top-like tools, shows stats for the processor, memory, disks, network, and processes. Although it might sound like any other top tool, the interface is exceptional.

Tips and Tricks for Containers

Inspect and extend containers, modify definition files, and create read-only containers for security.