Articles

Getting started in the HPC world requires learning to write parallel applications and learning to administer and manage clusters. We take a look at some ways to get started.

The world is swimming in data, and the pool is getting deeper at an alarming rate. At some point you will have to migrate data from one set of storage devices to another. Although it sounds easy, is it? We take a look at some tools that can help.

Hadoop has been growing clusters in data centers at a rapid pace. Is Hadoop the new corporate HPC?

Cloud computing is most definitely here – there are even commercials about it – but does it have a role in HPC? In this article, we discuss changes in HPC that could be solved effectively by cloud computing.

We look at the new features in Ceph version 0.56, alias “Bobtail,” talk about who would benefit from CephX Ceph encryption, and show you how a Ceph Cluster can be used as a replacement for classic block storage in virtual environments.

Previously we talked about using iostat to monitor local storage on your server or compute nodes, but what if you use NFS in your compute nodes to run jobs? The nfsiostat tool can help you understand the kinds of loads applications running on an NFS client put on the NFS storage server.

One tool you can use to monitor the performance of storage devices is iostat. In this article, we talk a bit about iostat, introduce a Python script that takes iostat data and creates an HTML report with charts, and look at a simple example of using iostat to examine storage device behavior while running IOzone.

Adding and subtracting software from a running cluster can be tricky; however, many application packages can be added or removed easily with a few tools and some simple tricks.

Environment Modules are a key tool for any HPC system, or really any server system. It allows you to control applications and tools and improve user productivity. Lmod is a fairly new implementation of environment modules and provides some new, needed features.

We talked with Michael Wong, OpenMP CEO, and Matthijs van Waveren, Marketing Coordinator, about the status of the upcoming OpenMP version 4.0 specification and some of its features and enhancements, as well as how to participate in its development.