HPC opening session

  1. Instructor / helpers / course introduction.
  2. Distribute the usernames and passwords.
  3. Let’s try to log in to the training cluster.
  4. Download today’s materials (ZIP file with slides and codes inside).
  5. Review the program for this morning: you have 1h49m of videos to watch, before 11:30am Pacific. We have many parallel programming frameworks videos: select the tools you are most interested in.

By mid-day you should be familiar with:

  • Compute Canada / the Alliance cluster hardware
    • cluster intended purpose and specs
    • filesystems
    • allocation policies
  • how to …
    • ssh into a cluster
    • edit remote files
    • transfer files between your computer and an HPC cluster
    • use software modules
    • compile serial, shared-memory and distributed-memory codes
    • write and use makefiles
    • install Python or R packages/libraries in your own directories on the cluster
  • basic parallel programming ideas in OpenMP, MPI, Chapel, Julia (slides only), Python Dask

Some of the hands-on exercises we will do in the mid-day Zoom session:

  • Edit a remote file in nano or vi or emacs.
  • Try to understand what the default GNU compiler module does: run module show on it, print PATH variable, locate the GNU C compiler.
  • Check if your favourite research software is installed on the cluster.
  • Write a makefile from scratch.
  • Try left+right or upper+lower split panes in tmux on the cluster.