HPC introduction course
Content
This course summarizes the basics that VSC users need to know to start computing on the VSC HPC infrastructure:
- What is the VSC
- Tier-2 clusters Genius and wICE
- Storage locations
- Login nodes
- Connection setup (PuTTY, NX and terminal)
- Software environment
- How to submit jobs
- interactive jobs
- batch jobs
- inspect errors and output
- managing jobs
- Additional tools such as Apptainer and atools
- Hands-on and demo practices
Target audience
This course is primarily targeted at researchers who would like to start using the VSC compute infrastructure, in particular the HPC clusters hosted at KU Leuven.
Duration
Total duration: 4 hours
Price
Free of charge
Prerequisites
- Active VSC account
- Basic knowledge of Linux (please follow the Linux introduction course if needed)
Result
- Requesting VSC account
- Getting familiar with VSC infrastructure, in particular the parts hosted at KU Leuven
- Understanding basic HPC concepts
- Connecting to a login node
- Using centrally installed software
- Ways to install your own applications
- Submitting jobs and editing jobscripts
- Checking the status of a job and cancelling unwanted jobs
- Understanding job output files
- Handling high-throughput computing workloads
Participants not affiliated with KU Leuven
If you do not have KU Leuven ID (e.g. u-, r- or s- number), please contact us at hpcinfo@kuleuven.be. If you cannot use Eduroam, we can give you temporary access to another wireless network.
Course material
Slides
You can access the slides in PDF format here.
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 |