Publications
Figures of merit for production HPC
This report summarizes a set of figures of merit of interest in monitoring the hardware and hardware usage in a Sandia high performance computing (HPC) center. These figures are computable from high frequency monitoring data and other non-metric data and may aid administrators and customer support personnel in their decision processes. The figures are derived from interviews of the HPC center staff. The figures are in many cases simplistic data reductions, but they are our initial targets in creating dashboards that turn voluminous monitoring data into actionable information. Because simplistic reductions may obscure as well as reveal the situation under study, we also document the necessary 'drill-down' and %60exploration' views needed to make the data better understood quickly. These figures of merit may be compared to dashboarding tools documented by other HPC centers. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank the staff of Sandia's production HPC department for their survey input.