Special Aspects of Accelerators

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Overview

Questions

• What are accelerators?
• How do they affect my jobs performance?

Objectives

After completing this episode, participants should be able to …

• Understand difference of performance measurements on accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs) to CPUs.
• Understand how batch systems and performance measurements tools treat accelerators.

Introduction

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Run the same example workload on GPU and compare.

ToDo

Don’t mention FPGAs too much, maybe just a node what accelerators could be, besides GPU. Goal is to keep it simple and accessible, focus on what’s common in most HPC systems these days

ToDo

Explain how to decide where to run something. CPU vs. small GPU vs. high-end GPUs. Touches on transfer overhead etc.

Key Points

• Tools to measure GPU/FPGA performance of a job
• Common symptoms of GPU/FPGA problems