Table of Contents

Best Practices

Best Practices

Article written by Bernhard Hermann (VSC Team) <html><br></html>(last update 2017-04-27 by bh).

Don’t run expensive calculations on login nodes

Don’t run expensive calculations on login nodes

resources shared by all users
- expensive tasks slow down everybody
tasks will be killed automatically
use batch jobs instead
very small tasks are OK
- 500 MB mem, 600 s, 1 core

Make sure your jobs do useful stuff

don’t explore the whole parameter space just because…
- …you can
- …computing time on VSC is so cheap (it really isn’t!)
check your results before submitting heaps of jobs
calculate only what will be used

Don’t use I/O

Don’t overuse I/O

use few large files over many little ones whenever possible
open(), close() outside loops
limit seek()
use HDF5
many short-lived and/or small files → use ${TMPDIR}
- if you need to keep them, store as archives
limit number of simultaneous jobs for I/O-bound calculations