Introduction to HPC Center

Goal of the course is to present the services of the HPC Center of TalTech, especially the computing hardware and to explain how to use these. A further topic is the "Estonian Scientific Computing Infrastructure (ETAIS)".

What the course is not: 

  • The course is not an introduction to programming or parallel programming (there are other courses at TalTech for that)
  • The course is not an introduction to scientific computing, i.e. it will not teach you what numerical method to use or how to perform domain decomposition, meshing, etc (there are other courses at TalTech for that, e.g. YFX1510, YMX0110)
The course will consist of four modules, each about a half-day long. Each module includes a lecture/presentation and hands-on sessions.

Module 1: Linux Command Line

  • Short Linux history
  • multi-user functionality
  • remote access (ssh)
  • PC vs. Workstation vs. Server (hardware and concept)
  • filesystem tree
  • shell, terminal and command-line use
  • environment variables, especially PATH, and different library-PATHs
  • backup

Module 2: Introduction to cluster usage and HPC

  • Cluster, grid, cloud
  • "time-sharing systems", resource manager, batch systems
  • accessing TalTech’s cluster
  • submitting jobs with SLURM
  • SMP (OpenMP) vs distributed (MPI)
  • best practises (some optimization)
  • ETAIS
  • international HPC resources and courses

Module 3: Introduction to OpenStack/ETAIS use
upcoming (not yet available)

Module 4: Remote visualization

upcoming (not yet available)