How to Buy a Supercomputer for Scientific Computing
Buying a new supercomputer that both maximises total performance, given our budget, and whose architecture suits our users' workloads is a very difficult balancing act. There are a wide range of decisions to be made, such as: CPU architecture; node count; memory size/bandwidth; GPU count; interconnect type; storage size; filesystem type/bandwidth; cooling type and power budget to name but a few. In order to balance all of these constraints we need to come up with a scoring system to compare potential candidate supercomputers. In this talk we describe the Scalable System Improvement (SSI) metric and apply it to the system refresh of Niagara & Mist.
-------
This webinar was presented by James Willis (SciNet) on April 17, 2024, as a part of a series of weekly Compute Ontario Colloquia. The webinar was hosted by SciNet. The colloquia cover different advanced research computing (ARC) and high performance computing (HPC) topics, are 45 to 60 minutes in length, and are delivered by experts in the relevant fields. Further details can be found at https://www.computeontario.ca/trainin... .