Workshops and Tutorials

Owned by Simon Alexander
Last updated: Nov 25, 2024 by Lisa Stafford
3 min read

Why invest the time and effort to learn HPC and Research Computing?

Learning how to use HPC will likely not be valuable for all users in all cases, but it can be exceptionally valuable and save significant time and effort in certain situations. Learning these skills provide HPC knowledgable users with a strategic advantage that can serve them throughout their academic, research, and professional careers.

Anyone with a workstation crashing due to memory problems from too much data, running time consuming computational tasks, performing repetitive computations, wanting to scale their computational work, or just needing more compute power should consider using HPC resources for improved speed, efficiency and time-savings.

HPC Skills to Learn

Becoming an expert in HPC requires knowledge in Linux Command Line, and mastering a number of tools. The tools that provide the greatest value to you may be different from those in other scientific domains. While it may seem initially daunting, UW ARCC helps all researchers regardless of HPC experience level. Our department has developed a number of tutorials and we offer bi-weekly office hours allowing you to learn HPC at your own pace. Below we provide a very general list and workflow for common set of skill to master on the road to becoming an expert HPC user:

  1. General HPC Use and Knowledge

    1. Access

    2. The Module System

    3. Job Scheduling (Slurm)

    4. OpenOnDemand

  2. The Linux Operating System

  3. Command Line Interface (CLI)

    1. Text Editors

  4. Data Management

    1. HPC Data Transfers

  5. Software Use and Package Management on HPC Clusters

    1. Environments and Software Package Management: Conda

    2. Python

    3. R and R Studio

    4. Jupyter Notebooks

  1. General HPC Use and Knowledge

    1. Access

    2. The Module System

    3. Job Scheduling (Slurm)

    4. OpenOnDemand

  2. The Linux Operating System

  3. Command Line Interface (CLI)

    1. Text Editors

  4. Data Management

    1. HPC Data Transfers

  5. Software Use and Package Management on HPC Clusters

    1. Environments and Software Package Management: Conda

    2. Python

    3. R and R Studio

    4. Jupyter Notebooks

Recent and Future Training Events

Argonne National Labs/ALCF Lighthouse Initiative Training

  • Hosted by UW and School of Computing

  • November 6, 2024 from 9am-4pm @ Wyoming Union

  • See this flyer for more information:

Agenda:

Time

Presenter

Title

Registration Info

Description

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Kristy Streu

Intro to Lighthouse and ALCF

General Admission

Learn about the Lighthouse Initiative at Argonne National Laboratory, which aims to broaden the ALCF user community through partnerships with academic institutions. We will introduce the ALCF systems available to users and highlight some ongoing research projects at the facility.

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

David Martin & Paige Kinsley

Virtual Tour of ALCF Data Center

General Admission

The ALCF is a national scientific user facility that provides supercomputing resources and expertise to the research community to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation in a broad range of disciplines. Come see the Data Center in action.

11:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Ye Luo

Using GPUs for Research

General Admission

Argonne researcher Ye Luo will discuss his research and how scaling with GPUs has enabled scientific breakthroughs. Specifically, he will share his work developing QMCPACK, an open-source Quantum
Monte Carlo code that enables chemists to parallelize atomistic and quantum-based simulations.

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

 

Lunch

Registration - General Admission

 

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Kristy Streu & Wilbur Ouma

Hands-On Getting Started on Polaris

Workshop Registration Required
20 Seat Limit -- Add Workshop Registration during checkout

This session will introduce users with coding experience on HPC clusters and/or supercomputers to the specifics of using Polaris at the ALCF. Polaris is the main production machine at the ALCF, featuring 560 nodes, each equipped with 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

2:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Filippo Simini

Hands-On Running Apps on Polaris

Workshop Registration Required
20 Seat Limit -- Add Workshop Registration during checkout

This session will demonstrate how to effectively train and run a PyTorch model on Polaris using parallel computing and multiple GPUs.

 

 

Introduction to Linux