Case Study: Nanyang Technological University speeds up research by eliminating I/O bottlenecks with Altair Mistral

Nanyang Technological University - Customer Case Study

Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore’s High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) supports a growing community of researchers with thousands of CPU cores, dozens of GPUs, and multi‑petabyte storage, but the small HPCC team needed better job‑level visibility to diagnose runtime problems, I/O, CPU and memory bottlenecks, and rogue jobs as they evaluated scaling to a hybrid cloud. To get those insights they turned to Altair and its Mistral profiling tool.

Altair deployed Mistral to profile application I/O and compare performance across local NVMe, tier‑1 all‑flash NAS, and tier‑2 SSD/HDD storage for a representative Gaussian workload. Mistral revealed mean read bandwidth as the bottleneck and produced concrete runtimes (local NVMe 32,208s; tier‑2 34,326s; tier‑1 40,746s), enabling NTU to pick best‑fitted nodes, choose cost‑effective storage tiers, and plan a hybrid architecture that improves performance and ROI. Altair’s Mistral continues to give HPCC the metrics needed for ongoing tuning and capacity planning.

Nanyang Technological University

Melvin Soh Hwee Jin

Senior Assistant Director, High Performance Computing Centre