By Jeff Green

ACENET is hosting two advanced computing workshops on Jan. 15 and Jan. 17 for researchers and students across disciplines.

Register here.

Introduction to High Performance Computing (HPC) with ACENET & Compute Canada / Introduction to Linux
Date: Monday, Jan. 15
Time: 2-4:30 p.m.
Location: Room C-3053, Chemistry/Physics Building

This session combines two introductory workshops. The first part of the workshop provides in introduction to HPC. What is high performance computing (HPC) and what can it do for me? How can ACENET help? Used by researchers across many disciplines to tackle analyses too large or complex for a desktop, or to achieve improved efficiency over a desktop, this session takes participants through the preliminary stages of learning about HPC and computing clusters, and how to get started with this type of computing. It then reviews software packages available for applications, data analysis, software development and compiling code. Finally, participants will be introduced to the concept of parallel computing to achieve much faster results in analysis.

The second part of the workshop introduces participants to the Linux command line. Linux is the terminal interface used to enable you to use the ACENET and Compute Canada HPC clusters from your desktop. It’s the tool to get your data on the clusters, run your programs, and get your data back. In this session, learn how to get started with Linux, how to create and navigate directories for your data, load files, manage your storage, run programs on the computing clusters, and set file permissions.

This workshop is designed for those with no prior experience in HPC or in working with a terminal interface, who are looking for an introduction and overview. Please bring a laptop.

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Introduction to Shell Scripting and Job Management with Slurm
Date: Wednesday, Jan. 17
Time: 2-4:30 p.m.
Location: Room C-3053, Chemistry/Physics Building

This workshop combines two introductory sessions. During the first part of the workshop, participants will learn how to use shell scripting to exercise the power of the command line. Shell scripting helps you save time, automate file management tasks, and better use Linux. The session will teach you how to name, locate and set permissions for executable files, taking input and producing output. Learn about job scripts, shell variables and looping commands.

The second part of the session will teach participants how to use Compute Canada’s queuing environment on the new national systems (Cedar and Graham), using the job scheduler Slurm. Learn how the scheduler works, how it allocates jobs, what are reasonable requests to minimize wait time, how to make the best use of the resources to be more efficient, how to get more throughput, how to get more jobs running at the same time, and how to troubleshoot and deal with crashes.

This workshop is designed for either new HPC users who are familiar with working in a Linux environment, but have not had experience with shell scripting or using Slurm to submit jobs to HPC clusters, or, for experienced users transitioning to Slurm or seeking to get more out of shell scripting and the scheduler.

In order to maximize benefits from the session, participants are strongly encouraged to have a Compute Canada account and to bring a laptop to do the exercises.

Register for these workshops online.

For more information, please contact ACENET.