HPC User Site Census: System Configurations and Technologies

November 8, 2019|Addison Snell; Christopher G. Willard Ph.D.; Laura Segervall

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Intersect360 Research surveyed the High Performance Computing (HPC) user community to complete its eleventh Site Census study. The study is a look at their
current computer system installations, storage systems, networks, middleware, and application software supporting these computer installations. This
report provides a detailed examination of HPC systems and technologies installed among responding HPC user sites. Our goal in this analysis is to provide
an overview of how HPC systems are configured, including the breadth of technologies most commonly used.

Our Site Census survey results can be found in many reports, including the following:

HPC System Configurations and Technologies
HPC System Vendors Installed
HPC Storage Configurations and Technologies
HPC Storage Vendors Installed
HPC Networking Technologies
HPC Processing Technologies (Including Accelerators)
HPC Operating System Installations
HPC Middleware and Tool Installations
HPC Application Installations (segmented into application domains):
- Biosciences
- Business: Business intelligence, analytics, pattern recognition, ERP, CRM, security, complex event processing, general business
- Chemistry
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
- Engineering: Structural analysis, electronic design automation (EDA), general engineering
- Finance and economics
- Geophysics
- Physics
- Scientific research
- Visualization and image analysis
- Weather modeling, climate modeling, environment modeling

The majority of HPC systems deployed are distributed-memory architectures, particularly clusters and blades. Dual-socket nodes remain common. Intersect360 Research continues to see increases in the amount of memory configured per node and the connection rate of accelerators.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Methodology

Total Responses

Table 1: HPC User Site Census Responses for HPC System Analysis

HPC SYSTEM CONFIGURATIONS AND TECHNOLOGIES

Definitions

HPC System Architectures

Figure 1: Architecture of Reported HPC Systems

Table 2: Total Nodes Reported in HPC Systems, by Architecture

Node Configurations: Processors, Memory, and Accelerators

Table 3: Processors per Node for Reported Distributed-Memory HPC Systems

Figure 2: Cores per Processor in Reported Distributed-Memory HPC Systems, by Year Installed or Last Modified

Table 4: Configured Memory per Core, per Processor, and per Node in Distributed-Memory HPC Systems, by Year of Installation or Last Modification

Figure 3: Configured Memory per Core, per Processor, and per Node in Distributed-Memory HPC Systems, by Year of Installation or Last Modification

Figure 4: Proportion of Reported HPC Systems Using Accelerators, by Year of Installation or Last Modification

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