HPC is like cooking?
Comparing HPC to cooking to illustrate how entangled we have become
Creating a supercomputer or HPC platform is a bit like cooking a meal. I might be hungry and sat on a plane as I write this, but I swear I thought about this for more than two seconds before whacking away at the laptop sat on the tiny tray table.
Like most meals, the typical HPC platform is fairly bespoke. You pick out your raw ingredients, prepare and assemble them carefully, garnish them with love using python and bash scripts to pull it all together et voila!
Some parts of the meal can be swapped out pretty easily. Want to change one x86 CPU for another? Not a big deal. It’s like having chicken instead of beef in your tacos.
Don’t fancy cooking at all? You can order the Uber Eats of HPC by spinning up an AWS Parallel Compute Service cluster instead. Costs a little more and takes a lot less effort.
Once its live though, swapping out the scheduler is more like trying to pick the Oregano out of your pasta sauce that was just delivered. (Ask anyone with kids how easy that is).
It doesn’t need to be this way though.
What we need is the HPC equivalent of Gusto. The ability to pull together a gourmet supercomputer but with the ability to swap out any ingredient with another. Yet it all still works together.
Ok my analogy of swapping out the scheduler breaks down a little here. Maybe I didn’t quite think this through all the way. But hopefully you get the idea. Imagine you could even remove the Oregano and swap it for Basil.
Want to make this happen? Yea you, me and our new secret HPC hero too. Maybe he’ll reveal himself… maybe you’ll have to wait and see. But this is a big part of the plan.
A highly coveted HPC t shirt to whoever gets closest to guessing where the picture was taken and what food is in it.
