Speeding Up Julia Startup with MPI: Using Scratch Space to Mitigate HDD Access Delay

Hello everyone,

I’m currently experiencing a significant slowdown when launching Julia with MPI on my cluster. I suspect that the issue might be due to the long HDD access times.

To mitigate this, I am considering copying the Julia program to the SSD-based scratch space shared among the nodes. The scratch space is wiped after every job, so I would like to avoid the overhead of re-precompiling packages each time. Therefore, I want to copy the precompiled environment as well.

Here are my specific questions:

  1. Which Julia files or directories should I copy to the scratch space to ensure smooth and fast startup?
  2. Which environment variables need to be set or adjusted when running Julia from the scratch space?
  3. Are there any best practices or recommendations for managing precompiled packages in this context?

I would greatly appreciate any advice or insights from those who have faced similar challenges.

Thank you in advance!