Instructor Notes
Glossary
The following list captures terms that need to be added to this glossary. This is a great way to contribute.
{:auto_ids} Accelerator : to be defined
- Beowulf cluster
- to be defined
- Central processing unit
- or simply processor is the (hardware) component of a computer that executes the instructions supplied by a program (software). Most modern desktop computers have multi-core processors, e.g. devices with 2 CPUs are called dual-core, with 4 cores are called quad-core and so on. Each core is a separate physical implementation of the electronic circuitry required to execute instructions.
- Cloud computing
- to be defined
- Cluster
- a collection of computers configured to enable collaboration on a common task by means of purposefully configured hardware (e.g., networking) and software (e.g. workload management).
- Distributed memory
- to be defined
- Grid computing
- to be defined
- High availability computing
- to be defined
- High performance computing
- to be defined
- Interconnect
- to be defined
- Node
- to be defined
- Parallel
- to be defined
- Serial
- to be defined
- Server
- to be defined
- Shared memory
- to be defined
- Slurm
- to be defined
- Supercomputer
- “… a major scientific instrument …”
- Workstation
- to be defined
- Grid Engine
- to be defined
- Parallel File System
- to be defined
Why use a Cluster?
Connecting to a remote HPC system
Working on a remote HPC system
Scheduler Fundamentals
Environment Variables
Accessing software via Modules
Transferring files with remote computers
Using the Research Data Warehouse
Parallelising with Job Arrays.
Instructor Note
The complete script can be downloaded from: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NewcastleRSE-Training/hpc-intro-comet/refs/heads/main/episodes/files/job_single_word-freq.sh
Instructor Note
Download the data using https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NewcastleRSE-Training/hpc-intro-comet/refs/heads/main/episodes/files/make-data.sh
Instructor Note
You can download the script from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NewcastleRSE-Training/hpc-intro-comet/refs/heads/main/episodes/files/job_array_word-freq.sh
Running a parallel job (alternative episode)
Instructor Note
Ideally the code for this episode should be pre-compiled and made available for students to download. We have found that expecting students to write or even compile code causes information overload and confusion.
The code and scripts to compile can be downloaded from https://github.com/NewcastleRSE-Training/HPC_Training_Example_Jobs. After compiling the two versions of the program, copy it to a place where students can copy or download it from.
The binaries of the two programs will be very small so the fact that there would be duplication if all the students copy the binaries to their own working directories should not really matter. In doing it this way, students will also get the opportunity to submit a job where the program they are using is in their local directory (rather than loading a module).