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    • Compute Ontario Colloquium (17 Apr 2024)

      This week's colloquium: "How to Buy a Supercomputer for Scientific Computing"  by James Willis from SciNet. The Compute
      Ontario Colloquia are weekly Zoom presentations on Advanced Research
      Computing, High Performance Computing, Research Data Management, and
      Research Software topics, delivered by staff from three Compute Ontario
      consortia (CAC, SciNet, SHARCNET) and guest speakers. The colloquia are
      one hour long and include time for questions. No registration is
      required. Most presentations are recorded and uploaded to the hosting
      consortium video channel.

      Teacher: James Willis
      Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 - 12:00 pm
      Events:
    • Abstract

      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.
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      Compute Ontario Colloquium Zoom Information Page
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      Slides File
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      Recording (YouTube) URL

  • Video Channels of the Ontario Consortia