Accelerate HPC Optimisation Through Workflow Benchmarking

Our expert consultants understand the critical role benchmarking plays in optimising your HPC investment. Whether you're exploring cloud technology or undergoing a procurement process, rigorous benchmarking is essential for making informed decisions.

Why is Benchmarking Essential for HPC Success?

Tailored Solutions: Benchmarking provides crucial data to identify the perfect hardware configuration for your unique workflows, eliminating the risk of overspending on unnecessary resources.
Cost Optimisation: By pinpointing potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies, benchmarking allows you to minimise operational expenses and achieve maximum value for money.
Informed Decision-Making: Gain clear insights into your workflow’s scaling capabilities, allowing you to confidently choose cloud instances or on-premises hardware that scales efficiently with your needs.

Our Approach

Our consultants translate benchmarking results into actionable insights, guiding you towards the optimal HPC solution that maximises performance and ROI.

Deep Workflow
Analysis

We delve into your workflows, analysing their behaviour and resource utilisation throughout their lifecycle.

Comprehensive
Benchmarking

We conduct rigorous benchmarks to assess factors like cache efficiency, memory usage, and core latency, providing a holistic picture of your system's performance.

Cloud Cost
Optimisation

When exploring cloud migration, we recommend cost-effective SKUs and strategies like reserved instances or spot instances to optimise your cloud expenditure.

Red Oak Consulting have been vital to solving some of our most complex challenges”

Met Office

Red Oak’s expert knowledge of the Microsoft Azure Ecosystem, as well as their expertise in HPC and specific choice of VMs, enabled us to successfully transition all our on-premises HPC workflows to the cloud. The use of CycleCloud, to implement our batch files dependent workflows was particularly valuable.”

Renewable Energy Systems

Explore Our Range of HPC Services

At Red Oak Consulting, we are committed to maximising performance while optimising costs, every step of the way. Contact us today and unlock the full potential of your HPC infrastructure

With unparalleled experience in deploying major, multi-million-pound systems worldwide, Red Oak Consulting stands as a leader in the field.

0 +

High-Performance Computing projects delivered

0 %

HPC projects delivered on time

0 +

HPC procurements ranging from £100K to £500 million

0 %

Proven track record of customer satisfaction

0 +

HPC in the Cloud projects

FAQ

Why is benchmarking important?

Most obviously, it allows you to understand the performance of an application or workflow on a particular system (including the per application characteristics which hit or create system bottlenecks).

Having a performance baseline for a range of applications allows comparison of performance or capability between different systems (including prospective replacements as part of a procurement activity) or simply help in identifying misconfigured installations.

Having a performance baseline for a range of applications improves the ability to identify unexpected performance regressions after software security patches, firmware, and operating system updates and associated changes in software dependencies (such as libraries and runtimes).

Benchmarking HPC applications allows you to track performance improvements or regressions over time which can help with prioritising RSE efforts in the areas that will provide the most benefit.

What's the difference between functional testing and performance benchmarking?

Functional testing ensures that the answer is correct (an important initial step when optimisation of an application has been undertaken) while performance benchmarking measures the time taken (to produce a correct answer – which you should still check btw) for different configurations under test (eg number of cores, parallelisation strategies incl. MPI threads etc).

Is benchmarking only about compute?

Benchmarking in HPC really looks at system level performance, with the emphasis on producing a balanced system (compute, memory, fabric and storage) which runs well under a variety of workloads and conditions.

What are the best/most common benchmarks in HPC?

For a variety of reasons High Performance Linpack (HPL) is one of the most common benchmarks but it is perhaps the one least suited to testing a system to simulate normal operation. The best benchmarks are usually the applications which consume the most cycles on your current system, since improvements in runtime will likely increase productivity and allow improvements to the scientific fidelity of results.