Is there a simple way to find out the power of cluster/node/supercomputer?

Question

I know there are some unix utils for simple architecture queries:

arch 
nproc
lsb_release -a

are there any simple ways to find out about the cluster/supercomputer/nodes - like to find out the number of teraflops of the machine and so on?

Answer 1

Short answer: no.

Slightly longer answer: no. You have to run benchmarks to measure those. The information should be available from the owners/administrators of the supercomputer in question.

Answer 2

Yes and no.

No you won't be able to find the effective number of flops the cluster is able to deliver in practice; you need a benchmark for that, such as HPL, the one used in the Top500 ranking. The value given by the benchmark will depend on the power of the processors, the speed of the memory, the latency of the network, etc.

But yes you will be able to compute the maximum theoretical power (in FLOPS) of one node from the contents of its /proc/cpuinfo, based on the processor family and frequency, and on the number of physical cores. See formulas here.

Answer 3

No standard way - most such clusters/supercomputers/nodes are custom built, and the administrators may have added tools to determine current and available usage such as number of fee nodes, but simply having a tool to return such a number wouldn't be very useful, practically.

The only way to actually get the number is to measure it, and there are several different methods of approaching this. It may have been measured for the system you are using, you can presumably ask the administrators if it has been, but otherwise it's just probably a matter of "Do we have enough processing power" rather than shooting for some numerical target.