A tale of two systems: flexibility of usage of Kraken and Nautilus at the National Institute for Computational Sciences

Abstract

The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee currently operates two computational resources for the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), Kraken, a 112,896-core Cray XT5 for general purpose computation, and Nautilus, a 1,024-core SGI Altix UV 1000 for data analysis and visualization. We analyze a year's worth of accounting logs for Kraken and Nautilus to understand how users take advantage of these two systems and how analysis jobs differ from general HPC computation We find that researchers take advantage of the flexibility offered by these systems, running a wide variety of jobs at many scales and using the full range of core counts and available memory for their jobs. The jobs on Nautilus tend to use less walltime and more memory per core than the jobs run on Kraken. Additionally, researchers are more likely to run interactive jobs on Nautilus than on Kraken. Small jobs experience a good quality of service on both systems. This information can be used for the management and allocation of time on existing HPC and analysis systems as well as for planning for deploying future HPC and analysis systems.