Small Tools for Managing HPC: It’s the Little Things

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The HPC world has some amazing “big” tools that help administrators monitor their systems and keep them running, such as the Ganglia and Nagios cluster monitoring systems. Although they are extremely useful, sometimes it is the smaller tools that can help debug a user problem or find system issues.

ldd

The introduction of sharable objects, or “dynamic libraries,” has allowed for smaller binaries, less “skew” across binaries, and a reduction in memory usage, among other things. Users, myself included, tend to forget that when code is compiled, we only see the size of the binary itself, not the “shared” objects.

For example, the following simple Hello World program, called test1, uses the PGI compilers (16.10).

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