HPC - introduction

Topics covered

This course will give a short practical summary of the basic topics that the new VSC users need to know to start working on the HPC cluster:

• HPC Glossary
• Description of the cluster
• VSC at KU Leuven Infrastructure
• Thin node cluster vs shared memory machine
• CPU vs GPU
• Software environment
• How to submit jobs
• Job's life cycle
• Hand-on session

Target audience

This course is primarily targeted at researchers that would like/need to perform large scale computations using HPC facility - current and potential VSC-users.

Previous knowledge

Having a basic knowledge of Linux is expected (if not please follow first the Linux-introduction course).

Results/Objectives

• What is Supercomputer, parallelism, VSC
• Understanding basic HPC terms
• Getting familiar with VSC infrastructure, KU Leuven HPC infrastructure in detail
• Knowledge of KU Leuven VSC software environment
• Getting familiar with shared memory concept
• Understanding the difference between CPU and GPU
• Getting the account
• Being able to connect to the system, transfer the files and display graphical applications
• Submitting own jobs and editing scripts
• Checking job status, deleting unwanted jobs
• Understanding output files
• Ways to install applications on the cluster
• How to perform parameter studies on the cluster