[ONLINE] Introduction to HPC (PTC course)

Europe/Prague
online

online

Description

Annotation

The course is designed as an introductory course for High Performance Computing (HPC), reflecting the supercomputing infrastructure at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center (IT4I). Part of the training will be live demonstrations and simple hands-on exercises.

Target Audience and Purpose of the Course

This training is dedicated to persons, who are interested in basics of HPC and are planning to use the IT4Innovations supercomputing infrastructure. The course is primarily tailored for application users with some experience of smaller platforms (desktops) that need to take advantage of HPC to solve their problems, which are on a scale that is beyond the scope of their current resources. Typically, scientists from various fields are not developers of the application employed, but need to better understand what is “behind the scenes”, i.e. how parallelization works.

The course will provide them with the introduction to most important aspects of HPC, especially as practiced at IT4I, and help answer related questions.

Level

beginner

Language

English

Prerequisites

A personal computer suitable for online education.

Agenda and Content of the Course

1. HPC systems architecture and IT4I architecture introduction - Brief introduction to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) in the world and in the Czech Republic. Presenting hardware architecture of the contemporary HPC systems, and basics every HPC user should know such as scalability, top500, path to exascale, or EPI.

2. Accessing and using IT4I clusters.

  • How to get your data to the cluster.
  • How to log in to the cluster and prepare a computation environment.
  • How to submit computational jobs.

3. Code development on the cluster.

  • Remote development on the cluster. 
  • Compiling and building software tools and custom code. 
  • Leveraging accelerated hardware (GPUs).

4. Parallel Programming Basics - This section briefly describes how to run parallel applications that use threads and MPI. And, how to set the environment variables for a hybrid run to efficiently utilize the provided hardware.

5. Performance Analysis Basics - Why should we care about performance? This section will answer the question, introduce you the basic concepts of a performance analysis, provide an overview of performance tools and show how to use them.

About the tutors

Ondřej Vysocký is a Ph.D. candidate at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava and at the same time works at IT4Innovations in the Infrastructure Research Lab. His research is focused on energy-efficiency in high-performance computing. He was an investigator of the Horizon 2020 READEX project which dealt with energy efficiency of HPC applications using dynamic tuning. Since that time, he develops a MERIC library, tool for energy measurement and hardware parameters tuning during a parallel application run.

Jakub Beránek is a researcher and a computer science Ph.D. student who is working as a research assistant in the Advanced Data Analysis and Simulations Lab. He is interested in distributed systems, code optimization and profiling, GPUs and applied machine learning.

Ondřej Meca holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. He is currently a member of the Infrastructure Research Lab at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center. His research interests include verification of parallel algorithms, development of pre/post-processing algorithms for large-scale engineering problems, and development of highly-scalable linear solvers.

Radim Vavřík is a Ph.D. student in Computational Science and a research assistant in the Infrastructure Research Lab. He is mainly interested in parallel computing, scalable algorithms design, GPU acceleration and code optimization, and heterogeneous architectures. He worked on hydrological and flood modeling software and high-performance heterogeneous platform for energy-efficient computing. Now, he works on GPU acceleration of the ESPRESO library.

 

Acknowledgements

                                                                            

This event was partially supported by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports from the Large Infrastructures for Research, Experimental Development and Innovations project "e-Infrastruktura CZ – LM2018140“ and partially by the PRACE-6IP project - the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 823767.

This course is supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic through the e-INFRA CZ (ID:90140).

    • Loging in to IT4I clusters with live support and troubleshooting: Optional for participants in need of help
    • Welcome and course introduction
    • HPC systems architecture and IT4I architecture introduction
    • Accessing and using IT4I clusters
    • 11:15 AM
      Comfort Break
    • Code development on the cluster
    • 12:30 PM
      Lunch Break
    • Parallel Programming Basics
    • 2:30 PM
      Comfort Break
    • Performance Analysis Basics
    • Q&A and Closing