Coding for Reproducible Research: Introduction to ISCA and High Performance Computing - 2 Sessions - 1st Session

Note on registration:

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All courses are currently scheduled to be held on Streatham Campus. For most courses, we have some availability for online places for those unable to attend in person, but these are prioritised for those based outside of Exeter, or who have other reasons for not being able to attend in person. We know that some of you prefer to have the option to attend virtually, even if you are in Exeter, but in our experience, the learning process is greatly enhanced when you are in the room with the instructors, helpers and other participants. We therefore strongly encourage anyone who can attend in person to do so. We would also like to emphasise that you are more likely to get an in person place compared to a virtual place.

Introduction to ISCA and High Performance Computing (2 sessions: 1pm – 4pm: 1 and 8 November, Training Room 4, Old Library)

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.

This course will cover:
• 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-requisites:
• An account on ISCA
• Some experience with the command line (e.g. attended an Introduction to Unix Course).

f you have any questions about the content of any of these workshops, please get in touch with Eilis Hannon (e.j.hannon@exeter.ac.uk) or Fliss Guest (f.l.guest@exeter.ac.uk).