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International Conference on High Performance Computing

ISC High Performance 2015: High Performance Computing pp 358–375Cite as

Modeling the Productivity of HPC Systems on a Computing Center Scale

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 9137)

Abstract

In pursue of exaflop computing, the expenses of HPC centers increase in terms of acquisition, energy, employment, and programming. Thus, a quantifiable metric for productivity as value per cost gets more important to make an informed decision on how to invest available budgets. In this work, we model overall productivity from a computing center’s perspective. The productivity model uses as value the number of application runs possible during the lifetime of a given supercomputer. The cost is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an HPC center including costs for administration and programming effort. For the latter, we include techniques for software cost estimation of large codes taken from the domain of software engineering. As tuning effort increases when more performance is required, we further focus on the impact of the 80-20 rule when it comes to development effort. Here, performance can be expressed with respect to Amdahl’s law. Moreover, we include an asymptotic analysis for parameters like number of compute nodes and lifetime. We evaluate our approach on a real-world case: an engineering application in our integrative hosting environment.

Keywords

  • Productivity
  • Cost-benefit ratio
  • Cost efficiency
  • TCO
  • Development effort
  • COCOMO
  • 80-20 rule
  • Pareto principle
  • Computing center
  • Scalability

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IT Center, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Sandra Wienke, Hristo Iliev, Dieter an Mey & Matthias S. Müller

  2. Chair for High Performance Computing, RWTH Aachen University, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Sandra Wienke, Hristo Iliev, Dieter an Mey & Matthias S. Müller

  3. JARA – High-Performance Computing, Schinkelstr. 2, 52062, Aachen, Germany

    Sandra Wienke, Hristo Iliev, Dieter an Mey & Matthias S. Müller

Authors
  1. Sandra Wienke
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  2. Hristo Iliev
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  3. Dieter an Mey
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  4. Matthias S. Müller
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Correspondence to Sandra Wienke .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), Hamburg, Germany

    Julian M. Kunkel

  2. Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), Hamburg, Germany

    Thomas Ludwig

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Wienke, S., Iliev, H., an Mey, D., Müller, M.S. (2015). Modeling the Productivity of HPC Systems on a Computing Center Scale. In: Kunkel, J., Ludwig, T. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9137. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20119-1_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20119-1_26

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