Overview of Parallel jobs

The web page explaining basic job submission assumed that jobs were serial (single core) and so were submitted to the serial partition (queue). Many research applications are able to use multiple cores in order to speed up their runs. Such jobs are submitted to the parallel partition. The HEC supports both shared-memory and distributed memory paraellism, as explained in the sections below.

Shared memory parallelism refers to parallel applications which must have all their components (e.g. process or threads) running on the same compute node. OpenMP (the Open Multiprocessing standard) is a common standard used to create multi-threaded applications, which support shared memory parallelism.

Distributed memory parallelism refers to parallel applications which can run across multiple compute nodes, and their components communicate across the network. MPI (the Message Passing Interface) is a common standard used to create multi-process applications, along with an application launcher which will distribute the application’s processes across compute nodes.

Note

Applications must be specifically written to run in parallel - either shared- or distrubted- memory. Submitting a non-parallel (ie, serial) job to the parallel queue won’t result in any speed up - it will run in serial.

Tip

More cores doesn’t always guarantee an application will run faster: No parallel application scales up to larger numbers of cores perfectly, and the scalability varies both between applications and sometimes between different use cases or models within the same application. Most applications will run slower if made to run on too many cores, as the constant communications required between the different components of the application will eventually dominate over ‘real’ computational work. When trying out a new parallel application (or a new type of workload), it’s best submit some test jobs of different sized to find out the sweet spot for scaling for your particular workload.