ADVANCED USE OF SUPERCOMPUTERS

Imad Kissami

[email protected]

2023/2024

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
Definition of Computer

Definition:
- Computer is a programmable machine.
- Computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions.
- Computer is any device which aids humans in performing various kinds of computations or calculations.
Three principles characteristic of computer:
- It responds to a specific set of instructions in a well defined manner.
- It can execute a pre-recorded list of instructions.
- It can quickly store and retrieve large amounts of data.

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
The Abacus

The abacus, a simple counting aid, may have been invented in Babylonia (now Iraq) in the fourth century B.C.
It used to perform basic arithmetic operations.

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
Jacquard Loom

The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1881.

It an automatic loom controlled by punched cards.

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
The ENIAC
ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
It was the first electronic general purpose computer.
Completed in 1946.
Developed by John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchl.

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
The IBM 360

Developed by Gene Amdahl in 1965.

It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applications

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
The PDP-8

Was introduced on 22 March 1965

12-bit minicomputer Produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Priced at $18,500 (equivalent to about $150,000 in 2020)

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
The Microprocessor

A computer chip that contains on it

the entire CPU
- Mass produced at a very low
price
- Computers become smaller and
cheaper
intel 4004 – the first computer on a
chip, more powerful than the original
ENIAC.
Intel 8088 – used in IBM PC

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
Hardware

Hardware – the physical devices that make up a computer (often referred to as the computer system)

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
Hardware core

CPU (Central Processing Unit)

- CPU (machine) cycle – retrieve, decode, and execute
instruction, then return result to RAM if necessary
- CPU speed measured in gigahertz (GHz)
+ GHz – number of billions of CPU cycles per seconds
RAM (Random Access Memory)
- Also called Memory, Main Memory, or Primary Storage
- Measured in gigabytes (GB, billions of bytes) today
+ Byte − > Character
- RAM is volatile
+ Temporary storage for instructions and data

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 General knowledge

General knowledge
Capacity of Secondary Storage Devices

Kilobyte (KB or K) – about 1 thousand bytes

Megabyte (MB or M or Meg) – about 1 million bytes
Gigabyte (GB or Gig) – about 1 billion bytes
Terabyte (TB) – about 1 trillion bytes

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 Modern architecture

Modern architecture (CPU)

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What’s Supercomputer?

Resource manager
A supercomputer is a computer with high level of performance compared to a general-purpose
computer
Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS)

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What is a supercomputer?

cdc 6600: 1964 - three million calculations per second (3 MFLOPS)

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What is a supercomputer?

Summit: 2018 - 36000 cores - 200 quadrillion calculations per second

Toubkal: 2021 - 71,232 cores (5.01 PFLOPS)
SimLab: 2014 - 696 cores

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What is a supercomputer?
Frontier: 2022 - 8 million cores - AMD EPYC with 64 cores and speed up to 2GHz - quintillion
calculations per second (1,102 exaFLOPS)

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What is a supercomputer?
Cluster Processor
Chip Node

Shared memory Shared memory Shared memory

Network

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 What’s Supercomputer?

What’s slurm?

Resource manager
Manage pool of computational resources
Allocate resources based on constraints (node count, CPU count, available memory, GPUs)
Track active of allocated resources

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 What’s slurm?

What’s slurm?

Job scheduler
Accept job submissions (description of work to be performed, resource constraints)
Order jobs for execution (priority queue)
Execute jobs (allocate resources, configure environment, launch tasks)
Track resources usage

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs

A job script contains the command(s) to be executed when the job eventually executes
Example job scripts can be found at https://github.com/HPC-Simlab/Tutorials
Header at top of job script can include resource constraints and other job-specific information for
slurm
The same flags you would enter on the command line, prefixed with #SBATCH

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs

CPU/memory resource constraints

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs

Time constraints

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs
Time constraints

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs

Partitions on SimLab:
defq: partition is automatically used if no partition is specified by all jobs.
shortq: partition used for short jobs (max. 12 hours)
longq: partition used for long jobs (max 30 days)
special: used for running parallel jobs (max 30 minutes).
visu: partition used for visualization.
gpu: partition used for gpu computations (all nodes in this partition have gpu card V100 or P40)

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 What’s slurm?

Submitting jobs

Partitions on SimLab:

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 What’s slurm?

Job status

There are three unique ways to check job status with Slurm
Pending and running jobs:
squeue
scontrol
Completed jobs
sacct

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 What’s slurm?

Job status

squeue: information about jobs in the scheduling queue

defaut is to show all jobs in all states (except completed)

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 What’s slurm?

Job status
scontrol: view job state

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 What’s slurm?

Job status

scontrol: view job state

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 What’s slurm?

Job status
sacct: view data from job accounting log/database
Once job completes execution, the only way to access its info
includes:
exit code and state
total resource utilization

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