This remote webinar will be a quick 1.5-hour introduction to high-performance computing for those without any HPC experience. We will start with an overview of the HPC cluster hardware and a quick description of the resources available on Compute Canada's national systems. We will then take a look at the basic tools and techniques for working on a cluster: software environment and modules, overview of installed programming languages and compilers, quick introduction to parallel programming frameworks, and finally the Slurm job scheduler. You will learn how to submit serial, shared- and distributed-memory jobs, and work inside interactive jobs. We will conclude with the best practices in cluster workflows.

Pre-workshop setup

For this workshop, we will provide guest accounts on our training cluster. If you want to follow hands-on, please have an SSH client on your laptop (on Windows laptops we recommend the free Home Edition of https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net; on Mac and Linux you most likely already have an SSH client installed).