HPC morning session

1. Instructor / helpers / course introduction.
2. Distribute the usernames, share the password.
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.

By mid-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 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.