Introduction to High-Performance Computing

This workshop is an introduction to using high-performance computing systems effectively. We obviously can’t cover every case or give an exhaustive course on parallel programming in just two days’ of teaching time. Instead, this workshop is intended to give students a good introduction and overview of the tools available and how to use them effectively.

By the end of this workshop, students will know how to:

Prerequisites

Command line experience is necessary for this lesson. We recommend the participants to go through https://epcced.github.io/hpc-shell/.

Schedule

Setup Download files required for the lesson
00:00 1. Why Use a Cluster? Why would I be interested in High Performance Computing (HPC)?
What can I expect to learn from this course?
00:20 2. Working on a remote HPC system What is an HPC system?
How does an HPC system work?
How do I log on to a remote HPC system?
00:55 3. Scheduling jobs What is a scheduler and why are they used?
How do I launch a program to run on any one node in the cluster?
How do I capture the output of a program that is run on a node in the cluster?
02:10 4. Accessing software How do we load and unload software packages?
02:55 5. Transferring files How do I upload/download files to the cluster?
03:35 6. Using resources effectively How do I choose the correct resources for my jobs?
How do I understand what resources my jobs are using?
04:00 7. Using shared resources responsibly How can I be a responsible user?
How can I protect my data?
How can I best get large amounts of data off an HPC system?
04:20 Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.