Do you need high-performance computing for your research projects? Come to the ICS-ACI Training Series and Office Hours to hone your ability to use the Advanced CyberInfrastructure (ICS-ACI), Penn State’s high-performance research cloud. Gain access to ICS-ACI, learn about its different subsystems, and discover HPC best practices. Beginners and intermediate users are welcome.

Each session is broken into two segments:

First half: ICS-ACI Training (registration required)
Second half: Open office hours (no registration required) — Members of the ICS team will be available to help participants one-on-one with any issues or questions they may have.

Seating is limited. Please RSVP at least two days before your chosen session, and sign up for only one of each seminar. Attendees should bring their own laptop to Seminars 2-4.

Requirements

There are no prerequisites for Seminar 1. For Seminar 2, 3, or 4, please do the following before the training:

Bring a laptop and charger to the training session
Install Exceed onDemand on your laptop
Obtain an ICS-ACI account
Have some knowledge of the command line

In addition, for Seminar 4, you should know how to:

Submit and run jobs on the cluster
Compile and run simple codes

Fall 2018 Seminar Schedule

Seminar 1 – ICS-ACI System Basics

Wednesday, August 29, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m.,189 Energy and the Environment Laboratory
Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building
Wednesday, October 24, 1–2:30 p.m., W203 Millennium Science Complex

Seminar 2 – Submitting your First Job

Monday, September 10, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building
Monday, October 1, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building
Wednesday, November 7, 2018, 10:00–11:30 a.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building

Seminar 3 – Intro to HPC Programming

Wednesday, October 17, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., W203 Millennium Science Complex
Monday, November 26, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building

Seminar 4 – Intermediate HPC

Monday, October 22, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building
Wednesday, November 28, 2018, 1–2:30 p.m., 252 Erickson Food Science Building

About the Seminars:

Seminar 1: ICS-ACI System Basics (for beginners; laptop not required)
This seminar will cover:

How to get an ICS account
What the different systems are used for (ACI-b vs ACI-i)
How to connect to the clusters
Using Linux (command line)
Navigating the ICS-ACI file system and software stack
Using the I-ASK Center and online documentation

Seminar 2: Submitting your First Job (Laptop, Exceed onDemand, and ICS-ACI account required)
This seminar will cover:

Moving data to/from ICS-ACI (scp, rsync, Globus, etc.)
Allocation usage and topography for jobs
Batch job submission script basics
How to run a simple job (Interactive GUI, Interactive command line, Batch)
Archival Storage

Seminar 3: Intro to HPC Programming (Laptop, Exceed onDemand, and ICS-ACI account required)
This seminar will cover:

Compiling basic codes
Linking to system libraries
Automatic optimizations
"Best" practices
Parallelization Techniques (Shared [OpenMP] and Distributed [MPI])
How to compile and run a simple serial and parallel (MPI) job in batch mode

Seminar 4: Intermediate HPC (Laptop, Exceed onDemand, and ICS-ACI account required)
This seminar will cover topics in multi-system/user development and understanding/boosting code performance:

Version Control
Compilation Automation
Diagnosing bottlenecks
Scaling studies (strong and weak)
Basic optimization techniques
I/O management

To make full use of the training, attendees of this seminar should have the following prerequisite skills:

Submit and run jobs on the cluster
Compile and run simple codes

ICS-ACI Training Series Fall 2018