Arun-HPCC

Welcome to Arun HPCC documentation and usage guidelines. This documentation is designed to help you to work with Arun HPCC. Like any High Performance Computing facility Arun HPCC is a remotely accessible facility which is shared among many users for their high performance computing need. Being a shared facility it is very important to be responsible while using the facility. The general rule is Do not do anything that can or might cause problem to other users. Let's get to know Arun HPCC first.

A HPC facility is consist of many nodes. Nodes are typically separated in two main category.

  • Head Node
  • Compute Nodes

Cluster Block Diagram

Control Nodes

Head Node or nodes, which is also sometimes called control nodes are responsible to manage various aspect of the cluster facility. This also acts as a Gateway for the cluster to the world. Head node(s) also controls the user login and the job submission to the cluster. User basically login into the Head Node via SSH over the internet. After logging in the user can create and submit Jobs for processing. Head node(s) also controls the computing resources, their allocation and running the user Jobs.

Compute Nodes

On the other hand Compute Nodes are responsible to run the submitted user Jobs. Head node allocate appropriate hardware resources from the compute nodes according to the Job request. Compute nodes follows the instruction of the Job script and process the computation.

GPU Node

Recent days GPU is no longer for gaming only, it has becomes a major hardware for massively parallel computation. It is called GPGPU or General Purpose GPU. From embarrassingly parallel scientific code to tackle huge computation of an Artificial Neural Network GPU is being using everwhere.

Arun HPCC is not far behind. It has one computation node with Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU. With this GPU node Arun HPCC also steps into the massively parallel world of GPGPU.

NOTE

Other than Head Node and Compute Nodes big cluster has separate nodes for management of differenct resources. E.g. storage, scheduler etc.

Arun HPCC is a small computation facility. So it has one Head Node which can easily handle the management task of the cluster as well as handle the job scheduler.