Welcome#
These workshop notes are designed to be delivered at a synchronous training session, but also to work as independent study materials.
Visit our training page to find upcoming dates and book.
Warning
You need an account on Aire in order to complete this course. Please request an account as soon as possible (at least a week before the course begins) to ensure you can participate fully.
These notes are based on our HPC user documentation, adapted for presentation and learning as opposed to reference.
Content#
The purpose of the workshop is to introduce research computing and high performance computing (HPC) at Leeds and getting you some hands-on experience with Linux and our HPC platforms. You will learn how to use different software and run code your code on the HPC platform, how to submit batch jobs and request different resources, where to store your data, and how to leverage simple parallelisation.
This course will be useful to learners who are completely new to High Performance Computing, or to those with some experience of HPC elsewhere but new to the platforms and resources at Leeds.
Basic experience with the Linux command line and some programming experience would be very useful. If you are unfamiliar with the Unix shell we would encourage you to attend HPC0: Introduction to Command Line Linux. This is not an introductory programming workshop (see workshops SWD1a: Introduction to Python programming, SWD1b: Introduction to R programming if that is what you need).
Objectives#
In this course, we cover:
Transferring data to and from HPC resources
Managing storage on HPC resources
Job submission, monitoring and cancellation
Accessing different software on the HPC system
Developing scripts to run codes and applications
Benchmarking and analysing how jobs scale
This course includes practical exercises and hands-on coding that you will be guided through. Note that this course expects basic familiarity with the Linux command line.
Prerequisites#
For this course, you will need an account on the HPC system at Leeds Aire. You will also need a method of connecting to Aire from your machine.
Warning
You need an account on Aire in order to complete this course. Please request an account as soon as possible (at least a week before the course begins) to ensure you can participate fully.
Warning
You need to be able to connect to Aire from your machine for this course. If you are attending this course in person and do not plan on using your own laptop, we will show you how to connect from one of the cluster machines.
If you are attending online or plan on using your own laptop, please follow the instructions here to ensure you have the required software installed on your machine.