HPC Day 1

1. Instructor / helpers / course introduction.
2. Distribute the usernames, share the password.
3. Let’s try to log in to the training cluster.
4. Review the program for today: you have 1h49m of videos to watch.

By the end of the day you should be familiar with:

• Compute Canada cluster hardware
  • cluster intended purpose and specs
  • filesystems
  • allocation policies
• how to ssh into a cluster
• how to edit remote files
• how to transfer files between your computer and an HPC cluster
• using software modules
• compiling serial, shared-memory and distributed-memory codes
• basic parallel programming ideas in OpenMP, MPI, Chapel, Python Dask
• writing and using makefiles
• installing Python or R packages/libraries in your own directories on the cluster

Some of the hands-on exercises we will do in the afternoon 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.