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CentOS Replacement Rocky Linux Is Now in GA and Under Independent Control

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is announcing the general availability of Rocky Linux, release 8.4, designed as a drop-in replacement for the soon-to-be discontinued CentOS. The GA release is launching six-and-a-half months after Red Hat deprecated its support for the widely popular, free CentOS server operating system.

HPC Wire 21-June-2021 ()

For more information, do take a look at CentOS Replacement Rocky Linux is now in GA and Under Independent Control

Do take a look at Rocky Linux site

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Supercomputing aboard the International Space Station (ISS)

In this episode of HPE Tech Talk, learn how the International Space Station will use the supercomputer’s next-gen edge computing capabilities to accelerate space exploration and the discovery of applications that benefit us here on earth.

HPE Tech Talk

For more information, see Supercomputing aboard the International Space Station (ISS)

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Basic CURL Commands

curl is a command line tool to transfer data to or from a server. It is able to use any of the supported protocols like HTTP, FTP, IMAP, POP3, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, TFTP, TELNET, LDAP or FILE. This tool is very useful for automation, since it is designed to work without user interaction. Furthermore, curl can transfer multiple file at once.

Basic Single URL Usage

% curl https://thelinuxcluster.com/

2a. Save the Download File with a preferred file name

Save the Download File on the local machine with the name provided with the parameter.

% curl -o test.o https://thelinuxcluster.com/test.output

2b. Save the Download File

% curl -O https://thelinuxcluster.com/test.output

2c. Download Multiple Files. Just Multiple -O

% curl -O https://thelinuxcluster.com/CentOS1.iso -O https://thelinuxcluster.com/CentOS2.iso -O https://thelinuxcluster.com/CentOS3.iso

3a. Display a Progress Meter

% curl --progress-bar -o test.o https://thelinuxcluster.com/test.output

3b. Do not display a Progressive Bar

% curl --silent -o test.o https://thelinuxcluster.com/test.output

4 Limit Rate of Data Transfer

% curl --limit-rate 1000K -o test.o https://thelinuxcluster.com/CentOS1.iso

5a Uploading a File to the FTP Server

% curl -u username:userpassword -T myfile ftp://ftp.thelinuxcluster.com/

5b. Appending the File to the FTP Server

% curl -u username:userpassword -a -T myfile ftp://ftp.thelinuxcluster.com/

5c Downloading the File to the File Server

% curl ftp:/ftp.thelinuxcluster.com/CentOS79.iso --user username:userpassword -o myCentOS79.iso

6a. Verifying SSL Certificate

% curl --cacert server.crt https://thesupersecureserver.com

6b. Ignoring SSL Certificate

% curl -k https://thesupersecureserver.com/

7a Proxy Server

% curl -x proxy_name:proxy_port https://thelinuxcluster.com

7b Proxy Server which requires authentication

% curl --user username:userpassword -x proxy_name:proxy_port https://thelinuxcluster.com

8 Sending Email

% curl --url "smtps"//smtp.thelinuxcluster.com:465: --ssl-reqd --mail-from "sender@thelinuxcluster.com" --mail-rcpt "receiver@thelinuxcluster.com" --upload-file maincontent.txt --user "sender@thelinuxcluster.com:password" --insecure

References:

  1. Learn to use CURL command with examples
  2. Curl command in Linux with Examples

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Why IBM is suing GlobalFoundries over Chip Roadmap failures

An interesting article on delicate relationship between chip designs and foundries

The tight linkage between chip designs and chip manufacturing processes has caused its shared of havoc in the IT sector, and it is getting worse as Moore’s Law has slowed and Dennard scaling died a decade ago. Wringing more performance out of devices while trying to keep a lid on power draw is causing loads of trouble as chip makers try to advance the state of the art. When there are failures to meet chip process targets set by the foundries of the world, chips drive off the roadmap page and smash on the floor.

Timothy Prickett Morgan (www.TheNextPlatform.com)
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Webinar – Advanced code optimization for 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors.

An interesting seminar which you may be interested to signed up Free-Of-Charge. The Registration site can be found at https://techdecoded.intel.io/webinar-registration/upcoming-webinars/

If the data center is part of your development wheelhouse, you’re likely familiar with a little CPU called “Xeon”. This webinar unpacks the latest methodologies of tuning complex AI and HPC workloads for the third generation Xeon platform (formerly code-named Ice Lake).

Delivering up to 40 cores per processor, 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors are designed for compute-intense, data-centric workloads spanning the cloud to the network and the edge.

In this session, Intel engineer Vladimir Tsymbal will show you how to optimize your AI and HPC applications and solutions to unlock the full spectrum of these processors’ power. You’ll learn:

  • The top-down tuning methodology that uses Xeon hardware-performance metrics to identify issues including critical bottlenecks caused by data locality, CPU interconnect bandwidth, cache limitations, instructions execution stalls, and I/O interfaces
  • How a high-level HPC Characterization Analysis helps you find inefficient parallel tasks
  • How to optimize software that uses the latest Intel® DL Boost VNNI instructions
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Finding physical cpus, cores and logical cpus

Number of Active Physical Processors

% grep physical.id /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u | wc -l
8

Number of cores per CPU

% grep cpu.cores /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u
cpu cores       : 26

Therefore the total number of cores is
8×26 = 208 cores

Number of Logical Processors

The number of cores seen by the Linux. Since the Server has switched on Hyperthreading 

% grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
416

References:

  1. How to find the number of physical cpus, cpu cores, and logical cpus
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Understanding Load Average in Linux

Taken from RedHat Article “What is the relation between I/O wait and load average?” I have learned quite a bit on this article.

Linux, unlike traditional UNIX operating systems, computes its load average as the average number of runnable or running processes (R state), and the number of processes in uninterruptable sleep (D state) over the specified interval. On UNIX systems, only the runnable or running processes are taken into account for the load average calculation.

On Linux the load average is a measurement of the amount of “work” being done by the machine (without being specific as to what that work is). This “work” could reflect a CPU intensive application (compiling a program or encrypting a file), or something I/O intensive (copying a file from disk to disk, or doing a database full table scan), or a combination of the two.

In the article, you can determine whether the high load average is the result processes in the running state or uninterruptible state,

I like this script…… that was written in the knowledgebase. The script show the running, blocked and runnin+blocked. 

[user@node1 ~]$ while true; do echo; uptime; ps -efl | awk 'BEGIN {running = 0; blocked = 0} $2 ~ /R/ {running++}; $2 ~ /D/ {blocked++} END {print "Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: "running"/"blocked"/"running+blocked}'; sleep 5; done

 23:45:52 up 52 days,  7:06, 22 users,  load average: 1.40, 1.26, 1.02
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 3/1/4

 23:45:57 up 52 days,  7:06, 22 users,  load average: 1.45, 1.27, 1.02
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/0/2

 23:46:02 up 52 days,  7:06, 22 users,  load average: 1.41, 1.27, 1.02
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 1/1/2

 23:46:07 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.46, 1.28, 1.03
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/0/2

 23:46:12 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.42, 1.27, 1.03
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/0/2

 23:46:17 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.55, 1.30, 1.04
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/0/2

 23:46:22 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.51, 1.30, 1.04
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 1/1/2

 23:46:27 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.55, 1.31, 1.05
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/0/2

 23:46:32 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.62, 1.33, 1.06
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 2/1/3

 23:46:38 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.81, 1.38, 1.07
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 1/1/2

 23:46:43 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.66, 1.35, 1.07
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 1/0/1

 23:46:48 up 52 days,  7:07, 22 users,  load average: 1.53, 1.33, 1.06
Number of running/blocked/running+blocked processes: 1/0/1

Another useful way to typical top output when the load average is high (filter the idle/sleep status tasks with i). So the high load average is because lots of sendmail tasks are in D status. They may be waiting either for I/O or network.

op - 13:23:21 up 329 days,  8:35,  0 users,  load average: 50.13, 13.22, 6.27
Tasks: 437 total,   1 running, 435 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.1%us,  1.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 93.6%id,  4.5%wa,  0.1%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  34970576k total, 24700568k used, 10270008k free,  1166628k buffers
Swap:  2096440k total,        0k used,  2096440k free, 11233868k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            
11975 root      15   0 13036 1356  820 R  0.7  0.0   0:00.66 top                
15915 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15918 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15920 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15921 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15922 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15923 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15924 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15926 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15928 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15929 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15930 root      17   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail           
15931 root      18   0  5312  872   80 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 sendmail

References:

  1. What is the relation between I/O wait and load average?

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Singapore using power of HPC for even better climate projections

Taken from Singapore developing its own ‘crystal ball’ for better climate projections

Global temperatures and sea levels are rising, certain extreme weather events could intensify, and rainfall patterns could become more erratic. But at a finer resolution, many questions remain about how these changes would manifest in Singapore and South-east Asia. These are questions that scientists at the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) – a division under the National Environment Agency’s Meteorological Service Singapore – are looking into. CCRS is working with the National Supercomputing Centre to downscale these models to produce grid cells spanning from about 2km to 8km.