The workshop is divided into the following three sections:
The aim of this section is to teach learners basic unix commands in order to help them interact with a HPC infrastructure. This may entail:
- filesystem navigation and manipulation
- difference command line and bash scripts
- remote sessions with
ssh
This section is meant to convey a simplistic mental model of the cluster, and how tasks get submitted, assigned and executed on the cluster.
Towards the end of the section, learners will submit a (number of) "Hello World" style batch job(s) that are aligned to the Unix Shell section above.
The session concludes by introducing and practising environment modules based on the observation that software on HPC and for HPC systems is very diverse and subject to change.
This section will guide learners through the process of performing a large HPC simulation (code available), and a high-throughput analysis (code available) of related data. The end goal will be to compare the simulation to the data (i.e. to relate their actions on a HPC installation to the scientific method).
For this, they will develop the workflow for a specific research scenario, for example:
Lola was hired by a research lab to help prepare the purchase of a multi-million dollar experiment. The experiment is known to fail at temperatures that are too low or too high. She knows that the temperature changes follow a daily pattern, and she's written some code to simulate these temperature changes. After running this code and generating the temperature predictions, she determines how closely her predictions match the actual temperature readings she has for every day in the last year. The simuation would take too long to run and generate too much data for her lab workstation, so she will use the local University's HPC facility for this work.