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

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

Future.HPC Virtual Global Event by Altair on 17-18 May 2022

Compute Intelligence for Breakthrough Results

Altair’s flagship high-performance computing event looks at outstanding HPC-driven end results customers have realized in the last year. HPC professionals from across the globe will share how they empower their organizations to turn CPUs and GPUs into groundbreaking medical research, faster planes and automobiles, smaller chips, smarter financial models, and so much more.

Featuring a mix of leadership presentations, panel discussions, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities, attendees can connect with and learn from fellow designers, engineers, IT specialists, and data scientists on the latest technology topics influencing every industry and the world around us.

Many of the presentations will have live audio translations including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.  The event will be presented in two time zones – CEST (Europe & APAC) and EDT (AMER).

For more information and agenda, do take a look at Event Website (Future.HPC – Altair Events)

Altair acquires Univa and Ellexus

Altair, (Nasdaq: ALTR) a global technology company providing solutions in data analytics, product development, and high-performance computing (HPC), today announced the acquisition of Univa, a leading innovator in enterprise-grade workload management, scheduling, and optimization solutions for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) on-premises and in the cloud.

For more information, see Altair Acquires Univa