Introduction to HPC and ISCA

Introduction to HPC and ISCA#

Overview#

A high performance computing (HPC) cluster is an essential tool for computational tasks that are too intensive for a personal computer, for example analysing large datasets. This course will introduce ISCA, the Exeter’s HPC cluster, and teach participants how to design a HPC workflow, interrogate the Slurm scheduling system, and run simple applications on cluster. At the end of this interactive course, participants will be able to translate what they have learnt to improve the efficiency of their computational research. This course is aimed at those who plan to use ISCA to perform their computational research or who wish to learn what ISCA could enable them to do.

Course Objectives#

  • what an high performance computing (HPC) cluster is and what type of tasks it is suited to.

  • what computing resources are necessary to run a large workload.

  • how to log on to the cluster and navigate around the file system

  • how to submit and manage job tasks in the scheduler’s queue.

  • the array jobs syntax, a tool to efficiently parallel repetitive tasks.

Pre-requisite Knowledge#

  • An account on ISCA

  • Some experience with the command line (e.g. attended an Introduction to Unix Course).