Tuning Compute Performance – Nanyang Technological University Targets I/O Bottlenecks to Speed Up Research

The High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore supports the university's large-scale and data-intensive computing needs, and resource requirements continue to grow. HPCC churned out nearly 19 million core CPU-hours and nearly 300,000 GPU-hours in 2021 to enable more than 160 NTU researchers. HPCC's small, four-engineer team turned to Altair for cutting-edge tools to help support their growing user community and evaluate scaling up to a hybrid cloud environment. They needed job-level insights to understand runtime issues; metrics on I/O, CPU, and memory to identify bottlenecks; and the ability to detect problematic applications and rogue jobs with bad I/O patterns that could overload shared storage. The HPCC team deployed Altair Mistral to profile application I/O and determine the most efficient options to optimize HPC at NTU.