02 From Computer to HPC
Overview
Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
What are the components of a computer
What is the difference between a regular computer and an HPC
Objectives
Overview of General Computing
Computer Component Review
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CPU: CPUs are the data process unit, they are composed of multiple cores. For legacy reasons software often refers the number of cores as the number of CPUs, so yeah that is confusing.
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RAM (a.k.a MEMORY): RAM is fast digital storage. Most programs utilize RAM for access to data needed more than once. RAM is generally non-persistent when the powered off RAM memory is lost.
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DISK: Disk is persistent digital storage that is not as fast as RAM. Disk storage can be made up of one or more disks such as hard drives (HDD) and/or Solid State Harddrives (SSD). Multiple disk can be configured together for increased performance and drive failure protection.
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NETWORKING: Switches and network access cards within computers allow for computers to be networked together.
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GPU: A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a computer component that is capable of rendering graphics, these are also useful for conducting certain mathematical calculations.
Consumer Computer vs Servers vs HPC vs Sumhpc
| Component | Home/Busines Computer | Server | Typical Individual Node in HPC | Typical Total HPC System | Individual Node on Sumhpc | Total Sumhpc System |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU (cores) | 4 - 8 | 12 - 128 | 32 - 128 | 1000s | 70* | 7,000 |
| RAM(GB) | 8 -16 | 64 - 960 | 240 - 3000 | 64,000 | 754 - 3TB | 76.8 TB |
| DISK (TB) | .5 - 1 TB | 8 - 100 | None - 1 TB | 100s (Networked) | NA | 2.7 PB |
| Networking (Gbe) | .1 - 1 | 1 - 10 | 40 - 100 | 40 - 100 | 40 | 40 + |
* note Sumhpc High Mem nodes contain 142 cores each and ~3TB of RAM.
HPCs are servers networked together and managed with a scheduler
Key Points
HPCs are typically many large servers networked together
HPCs utilized networked disk space instead of local disk space