Broadband Platform on HPCC
Current broadband studies may exceed 200K seismograms. To produce this number of seismograms, we need to use high performance computing.
Contents
Overview
In order to run the Broadband Platform on HPCC, users need to follow these steps:
- Installing and Building Broadband on HPCC
- Installing Desired Green's Functions and Validation Packages
- Configuring Required Environment Variables
- Creating Validation Runs
- Running Simulations
Broadband File System Issues
When running on HPCC, the validation scripts set up Broadband's BBP_DATA_DIR to use a directory in the /tmp filesystem. Because Broadband simulations are very I/O intensive, reading and writing thousands of small/medium files on an average simulation, we use a local filesystem on each compute node to minimize remote reads and writes and thus improve execution time. This approach also avoids creating a bottleneck a file server and eliminates unnecessary network traffic. It is therefore possible for multiple users to run their simulations on HPCC without significant interference.
Because the /tmp filesystem on each node is automatically cleaned at the end of each simulation, it is necessary to copy all wanted files to a permanent location. The HPCC validation scripts do that automatically after the simulations are finished (but before the PBS job ends).
