Description

This course is designed to give you an introduction to the terminology and practical usage of High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. These facilities are usually comprised of hundreds (thousands) of processing cores linked by high speed networks and usually attached to high speed parallel file systems.
The principles and terminology will be applicable to a large range of computing clusters. Every effort has been made to keep the information and instructions as general and generic as possible, but it is necessary to give specific examples. The examples are based on the computing facilities available at the University of Leeds.

At the end of the course you should:

• Be familiar with HPC terminology
• Compile simple programs
• Be familiar with the principles of batch queue systems
• Be able to use SGE as it is configured at Leeds
• Submit batch jobs
• Submit interactive jobs

This course is designed to give you a pragmatic introduction to making use of computing clusters. It does not cover, principles of Scientific Computing, programming, parallel programming, profiling and debugging.

Conventions

The majority of interaction with HPC systems is via the command line. To denote the command line shell prompt a $ sign will be used. This $ sign should not be typed at the command line, it a place holder.

Glossary

A glossary is available that lists the commonly used terms and commands.