A Fast and Responsive Web-based Framework for Visualizing HPC Application Usage

Abstract

Insights about applications and user environments can help HPC center staff make data-driven decisions about cluster operations. In this paper, we present a fast and responsive web-based visualization framework for analyzing HPC application usage. By leveraging XALT, a powerful tool for tracking application and library usage, we collected tens of millions of data points on a national supercomputer. The portable visualization framework created with Plotly Dash can be easily launched as a container and accessed from a web browser. The presented visualizations take a deep dive into the XALT data, analyzing application use, compiler usage, library usage, and even user-specific usage. Our analysis codes can distinguish between centrally installed applications and user-installed applications and can generate plots based on different metrics (no. of jobs or cpu-hours). Initial insights gained from this visualization framework have helped our support staff identify several goals for improving the software stack and helping users proactively.