Altair Mistral

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Tuning Compute Performance – Nanyang Technological University Targets I/O Bottlenecks to Speed Up Research

A customer case study writeup on how the HPC Team at Nanyang Technological University used Altair Mistral to tune Compute Performance.

The High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore supports the university’s large-scale and data-intensive computing needs, and resource requirements continue to grow. HPCC churned out nearly 19 million core CPU-hours and nearly 300,000 GPU-hours in 2021 to enable more than 160 NTU researchers. HPCC’s small, four-engineer team turned to Altair for cutting-edge tools to help support their growing user community and evaluate scaling up to a hybrid cloud environment. They needed job-level insights to understand runtime issues; metrics on I/O, CPU, and memory to identify bottlenecks; and the ability to detect problematic applications and rogue jobs with bad I/O patterns that could overload shared storage. The HPCC team deployed Altair Mistral™ to profile application I/O and determine the most efficient options to optimize HPC at NTU.

Tuning Compute Performance – Nanyang Technological University Targets I/O Bottlenecks to Speed Up Research
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Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional

A Paper has been published by Altair and myself on the “Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional”. For more information, do take a look at

The High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore employs the latest techniques to ensure good system utilization and a high-performance user experience. The university has a large HPC cluster with the Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager, and the HPCC team installed Altair Mistral™ to monitor application I/O and storage performance. In this paper, we describe how they used Mistral to analyze an HPC application. After getting some insights into the application, they profiled it against HPCC’s three storage tiers and gained detailed insights into application I/O patterns and storage performance.

Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional