Cores, threads, CPUs, sockets, vCPUs, nodes, hyper-threading …

• Overall: I don’t really understand! Please see elsewhere, unless you want my brief summary:
• Sometimes people show some of these as nested within others (e.g. threads within cores, cores within sockets).
• Terms may not be used consistently.
• It seems we can often think mainly in terms of threads.
• Most tools have an option to specify the number of threads and the amount of memory that the tool can request from the computer.
• e.g. bioinfo-tool myfile.txt --threads 8 --mem 16
• Usually, if you don’t specify anything, there will be a default setting (e.g. threads = 1)
• If your machine does not have enough threads or memory to meet what you specified (or what the default is) then the job will usually fail.
• More threads is usually faster if the tool is designed to work on multiple threads.
• For info about your system, type lscpu