Overview
The main benefit of a supercomputer is using many resources at one time for a calculation or running the same small calculation thousands of times. These computing modes are called HPC and HTC respectively. Scripts can only take advantage of the supercomputer if it’s written into the code.
My Code Runs Slower On the Supercomputer Than on My Laptop
This can happen when you take a script that ran on your laptop and directly run it on the supercomputer. Many programs, including Python and R, aren’t written to use multiple cores, so they will only use one core, no matter how many cores you request. When it comes to cores, it’s quantity over quality in the supercomputer. Individual cores in the supercomputer are slower than the cores in your laptop, so it’s expected that using one core on the supercomputer will be slower than one core on your laptop.
The speed of individual cores is called clock speed or CPU frequency. The clock speed on Aloe’s cores are about 2 GHz, while most laptop CPUs have clock speeds of 3-4 GHz.
Slower cores are cheaper, which allows more of them to be purchased.