HPC introduction course
Content
This course will give a short practical summary of the basic things VSC users need to know to start working on the HPC cluster:
- What is the VSC
- Tier-2 cluster
- The Genius cluster
- Storage
- Login nodes
- Connection setup (PuTTY, NX and terminal)
- Software environment
- How to submit jobs
- interactive jobs
- batch jobs
- inspect errors and output
- managing jobs
- Dedicated hardware:
- GPUs
- Big memory nodes
- AMD nodes
- Worker framework
- Hand-on and demo practices
Target
This course is primarily targeted at researchers that would like/need to perform large scale computations using HPC facility - current and potential VSC-users.
Duration
Total duration: 4 hours
Price
Free of charge
Prerequisites
- Active VSC account
- SSH key pairs (public and private) which you used to request your VSC account
- Remembering the passphrase that you used to generate your SSH keys
- Basic knowledge of Linux is expected (if not please follow the Linux-introduction course)
Result
- Understanding VSC user rights
- Requesting VSC account
- Getting familiar with VSC infrastructure, specially KU Leuven HPC infrastructure
- Understanding basic HPC terms
- Login to ThinKing or Genius
- Using software
- Ways to install applications on the cluster
- Submitting own jobs and editing scripts
- Checking job status, deleting unwanted jobs
- Understanding output files
- How to perform parameter studies on the cluster
Non-KU Leuven Audience
If you do not have KU Leuven ID (e.g. u-, r- or s- number), please contact us (hpcinfo@kuleuven.be) so that we can create a temporary account for you, with which you will be able to login on computers used during hands-on sessions or use wifi on your own laptop.
Online Course Materials
Slides
You can access the slides in PDF format.
Recordings
The recordings of major part of the presentation is available via Kaltura and My Media space, and you can find the list of the videos in the table below
| Section | Content | Video |
|---|---|---|
| Outline | Recommended | 8 min |
| VSC | Recommended | 8 min |
| Tier-2 clusters | Recommended | 3 min |
| Genius Cluster | Recommended | 3 min |
| wICE Cluster | Recommended | 5 min |
| wICE Interactive Partition Overview | Optional | 4 min |
| wICE Interactive Partition in Practice | Optional | 5 min |
| Storage | Recommended | 4 min |
| Login nodes | Recommended | 11 min |
| Connecting with PuTTY and terminal | Recommended | 11 min |
| Connecting with MobaXterm | Optional | 5 min |
| NX | Optional | 12 min |
| File transfer | Optional | |
| Software - basics | Recommended | 4 min |
| Modules - search | Recommended | 5 min |
| Modules - usage | Recommended | 5 min |
| Start to compute | Recommended | |
| Start to compute - Demo | Optional | |
| GPU partition | Optional | 9 min |
| bigmem partition | Optional | 8 min |
| Compute credits | Recommended | 12 min |
| Worker framework | Optional | 18 min |
| Epilogue | Recommended | 3 min |
Quick Survey
We value your feedback on our HPC training, and would like to invite you to the following brief survey (< 5 min) by following this URL.