Dear user,

If you’re here to do practical work, you will find the material here, otherwise please read on for general server documentation.

Welcome to srv-calcul-ambulant, a transportable computing server designed for organizing compute practicals on the road and performing precision benchmarking!

To clarify a terminology point that tends to trip people up, by “benchmarking” we refer to any sort of software execution whose main interesting output is a system resource usage count (e.g. execution time, number of bytes written someplace...) or derived quantity (e.g. peak storage bandwidth).

Our definition is by no means restricted to software which is specifically designed for this. If you are regularly monitoring your physics analysis script’s execution time over the course of its development to assess how much slower it’s getting as new features are added, then you are doing performance benchmarking and may benefit from srv-calcul-ambulant‘s benchmarking features.

Anyway, this documentation is meant to give you...

• A general overview of what you can expect from this server and how you are expected to use it.
• An introduction to the main activities that you are expected to carry out on this server, which is not meant to replace serious performance analysis training but only to give you an overview of what is possible and a cheat sheet of commands that you may want to try out.