Unveiling User Behavior on Summit Login Nodes as a User

Abstract

We observe and analyze usage of the login nodes of the leadership class Summit supercomputer from the perspective of an ordinary user -- not a system administrator -- by periodically sampling user activities (job queues, running processes, etc.) for two full years (2020-2021). Our findings unveil key usage patterns that evidence misuse of the system, including gaming the policies, impairing I/O performance, and using login nodes as a sole computing resource. Our analysis highlights observed patterns for the execution of complex computations (workflows), which are key for processing large-scale applications.