Applications

 What applications will you be using?

This may be one of the most important questions you can answer when configuring a new cluster. Your application needs can drive many of your configuration choices while obviating others, so it is critical to research your application requirements.

User groups and software vendors often publish performance results for different architectures, compilers, and interconnects running their codes. This can be quite valuable information, as different combinations of chip architecture, memory and disk configuration, interconnect, and software environments can yield quite different results. Sometimes community or in-house developed code(s) are developed primarily on a single architecture, compiler, Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation, or interconnect, and exhibit erratic behavior when ran under a different configuration.

Your Aspen Systems Sales Engineer can help you to determine what configurations we know to function properly with your applications. We also highly recommend that you take advantage of our benchmark clusters in order to determine real-world performance differences. Benchmarking your code(s) on an Aspen Systems benchmarking cluster can quickly show what combination of architecture, compiler, MPI implementation (if needed), and interconnect works best for your problem.

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