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  • in Software
  • 7 min read

The "It Works on My Laptop" Dilemma: Managing Software with Modules

A supercomputer without software is like an engine without a car. It can be powerful, with nothing to do. Software is what gives supercomputers purpose and direction, without it they would be useless. Sometimes this software is already installed on the supercomputer and sometimes it is something that you install yourself. Regardless of how it got there, we need a way to manage it, especially if there are multiple versions of the same software.

Why is My Job Waiting? Decoding the Cluster Queue

Have you ever submitted a job just to wait for it to start, without knowing why it’s sitting in the queue? In this blog post, I’ll talk about how the queue works on a supercomputer, how to determine why your job is waiting, and some tips to wait less time for your jobs to start.

Introducing the New RCAC Documentation Website

We are excited to announce the launch of the redesigned RCAC Documentation Website — a unified, searchable hub for everything you need to use Purdue's high-performance computing resources. The new site is built around three goals: find information fast, stay current automatically, and learn as a community. Whether you are a first-time user or an experienced researcher, here is what is waiting for you.

Checkpointing in a Preemptible Environment

What is Preemption?

In the context of computing, preemption refers to the act of stopping or pausing one process to allow another process to run, and we say that a task, X, preempts another task, Y, when X pauses Y to allow itself to run. We can use this concept of preemption in an HPC environment to maximize the utilization of the resources in the cluster by allowing low priority jobs to be preempted by higher priority jobs since this allows us to be lenient with the resource limitations placed on the low priority jobs.