COMPLECS: HPC Hardware Overview

All users of advanced CI can benefit from a basic understanding of the hardware to determine which factors affect application performance. In this session we provide an overview including CPUs (processors, cores, hyperthreading, instruction sets), the anatomy of a compute node (sockets, memory, attached devices, accelerators) and cluster architecture (login and compute nodes, interconnects, file systems). We also cover how to obtain hardware information using Linux tools, pseudo-filesystems and commonly used hardware utilization monitoring tools.

---
What is COMPLECS? - COMPLECS (COMPrehensive Learning for end-users to Effectively utilize CyberinfraStructure) is a new SDSC program where training will cover non-programming skills needed to effectively use supercomputers. Topics include parallel computing concepts, Linux tools and bash scripting, security, batch computing, how to get help, data management and interactive computing. Each session offers 1 hour of instruction followed by a 30-minute Q&A. COMPLECS is supported by NSF award 2320934.

---
Nicole Wolter
Computational and Data Science Research Specialist, SDSC

Nicole Wolter is a Computational and Data Science Research Specialist in the High-Performance Computing User Services Group at SDSC. She currently manages the accounts and allocations and provides user support for the three HPC systems at SDSC. Nicole graduated from San Diego State University with a degree in Computer Science in 2001. She is currently involved in working with and helping users porting their AI applications to SDSC’s NSF funded AI supercomputer - Voyager.