Infrastructure Assessment
Forensic analysis to unlock the true potential of your HPC cluster.
The Diagnostic Phase of High-Performance Computing
Before buying new hardware or changing software, you must understand exactly how the current system is performing. In HPC, an assessment involves deep forensic analysis to answer critical questions: "Why is our 10,000-core cluster only running at 40% efficiency?" or "Will our current storage survive the upgrade to AI workloads?"
The Three Pillars of Assessment
Physical Infrastructure
- Utilization: Finding the balance between RAM and Memory Bandwidth.
- Network Topology: Identifying hotspots in InfiniBand switches.
- Storage Latency: Eliminating I/O wait times.
Software Environment
- OS & Kernel: Driver audits for interconnect stability.
- Libraries: Optimization for specific CPU architectures (e.g., AVX-512).
- Containerization: Performance checks for Apptainer/Singularity.
Workload Efficiency
- Scheduling Logic: Filling the "Tetris" gaps in the scheduler.
- User Behavior: Monitoring resource requests vs. actual consumption.
Strategy: "Discover, Measure, Recommend"
Discovery (The "As-Is" State)
Automated inventory mapping and configuration audits to eliminate "drift" between nodes.
Workload Characterization
Profiling and classification of jobs into Compute-Bound, Memory-Bound, or I/O-Bound to optimize hardware placement.
Gap Analysis & Roadmap
Comparing current systems against future goals (AI/Deep Learning) to provide a factual future-proofing report.
HPC Assessment Toolkit
| Category | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Historical Usage | Splunk / ELK Stack | Analyzing years of logs to find usage trends and wasted resources. |
| Performance Metrics | Prometheus + Grafana | Visualizing long-term CPU/Memory trends and peaks. |
| Profiling | Intel VTune / Mosquitto | Deep-diving into slow-running scientific applications. |
| Storage Analysis | IOzone / IOR | Benchmarking filesystem read/write limits. |
| Network Analysis | OSU Micro-Benchmarks | Testing latency and bandwidth of the interconnect. |
Ready for a Full Assessment?
Download our comprehensive Assessment Checklist to start evaluating your cluster today.
Download Assessment Template (.docx)