Best Practices for Running HPC Batch Jobs

Rescale's engineering team is tackling the complexities of managing high-performance computing (HPC) systems in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, focusing on automating the setup of compute jobs for digital simulations and analyses. HPC batch jobs differ significantly from typical IT batch jobs, emphasizing speed, efficiency, and the optimal configuration of hardware and software to ensure performance and reliability. These jobs often require significant computational resources and can involve thousands of CPU cores across numerous nodes, making the correct setup of network fabric and hardware critical. The choice of hardware, such as chip architecture and network fabric like InfiniBand, has profound implications for cost, speed, and energy consumption, as does the use of middleware like MPI. Ensuring optimal inter-node communication is crucial for performance, as HPC jobs are often more network-bound than compute-bound. The first part of this blog series covers essential aspects of HPC batch job configuration, with a promise of deeper exploration into scheduling, costs, security, and multi-cloud management in the upcoming second part.