HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


Tech focus: software tools


ROBERT ROE TAKES A LOOK AT SOME OF THE SOFTWARE TOOLS AVAILABLE TO HPC USERS


Software tools can help to manage the complexity of HPC systems by enabling HPC experts or scientists


to focus on the jobs and scientific research being conducted, reducing the burden of running the system day to day. That is not to say that an HPC system should be autonomous, but by carefully selecting the right set of software tools, from job scheduling to cluster or resource management, HPC users can reduce some of the complexity of running modern HPC systems and ensure efficient utilisation of their computing resources. While there are several commercial tools


available from vendors such as Altair, Bright Computing and Univa, there is a growing movement to develop open source tools for the HPC community. The OpenHPC project, part of the linux


foundation, is a collaborative effort to provide a reference collection of open- source HPC software components and best practices which are designed to help lower the barrier of entry deployment, advancement, and use of modern HPC methods and tools. The collaborative nature of this project means that there is a community of organisations and developers working from a common desire to aggregate a number of common tools required to deploy and manage HPC Linux clusters. The community includes representation from a variety of sources, such as software vendors, equipment manufacturers, research institutions and supercomputing centres which aim to cover a wide variety of use cases.


This includes the provisioning of


tools, resource management, I/O clients, development tools, and a variety of scientific libraries to help scientists and researchers use HPC more effectively.


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Open standards The large number of contributors drives the varied aims of the project, as the partners aim to provide a stable and flexible open source HPC software stack, validated to run on a variety of hardware platforms. The project also aims to increase simplicity and to reduce the cost of deploying and managing HPC systems. This includes the performance and efficient utilisation of HPC systems, including insights and technical contributions from across the HPC ecosystem which are integrated and made available to the community. The project members design packages which are pre-built with HPC integration in mind, with a goal to provide reusable building blocks for HPC. Over time, the community plans to identify and develop abstraction interfaces between key components to further enhance modularity and interchangeability. In a presentation from August at the


HPC Knowledge Meeting ‘19, Karl Schulz, OpenHPC project lead discussed the development of OpenHPC and the project’s vision to support a wide variety of users and systems. ‘In the last several years, OpenHPC has emerged as a community-driven stack providing a variety of common, pre-built ingredients to deploy and manage an HPC Linux cluster, including provisioning tools,


”When we were forming this project, we really wanted people with different points of view”


resource management, I/O clients, runtimes, development tools, containers, and a variety of scientific libraries,’ Schulz said. ‘When we were forming this project, we


really wanted to have people from different points of view. People like me, users of HPC systems, then people who develop software for HPC... people doing scientific research and the people who are administering HPC systems. The vision is that we want to have the points of view of a lot of different folks, including vendors,’ said Schulz. ‘It is building-block orientated, you do not


have to use all of it. You can opt-in for bits and pieces. The same argument exists with provisioning systems. Maybe it’s not the one that you use, so it is easy to pull in other stuff. The other thing that has changed for me, is the fact that you can use these packages in your container, whether that be Docker or Singularity or Charliecloud, and I find myself doing this more and more,’ Schulz continued. This focus on ease of use and making


HPC more accessible is shown throughout g December 2019/January 2020 Scientific Computing World 7


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