Courses and Tutorials
Courses & Workshops
This webpage describes the following sections:
- The HPC Wiki
- HPC Online-Tutorials
- The HPC.NRW YouTube channel
- The Gauß-Allianz HPC calender
The HPC Wiki
An important part of HPC.NRW is the long-term training of HPC users in all relevant HPC topics across all universities in North Rhine-Westphalia.
In this regard, the HPC Wiki is of central importance.
The HPC Wiki aims to be a site-independent HPC documentation. This means that specific information about individual computing centers in different locations is bundled in the site specific section and all other articles should be kept as general and site-independent as possible.
Additionally, there are different sections for different target groups. For example, HPC Users, HPC Developer and HPC Admins can search specifically for topics that are relevant to them.
HPC Online-Tutorials
With regard to the targeted training of HPC users, our survey revealed the need for courses related to the operation of HPC-clusters as well as methods for performance profiling and optimization.
Therefore, an extensive introductory tutorial to Linux with a special focus on HPC, as well as a tutorial for performance profiling with Gprof, were created. These tutorials were supplemented by an introductory tutorial on parallelization with OpenMP.
Further tutorials on GPU programming and on topics such as benchmarking and scaling are currently in progress and teaching materials on Intel VTune and Python are planned.
This extensive, general introduction to Linux deals with basic topics such as the command line, directory structure, files, users, rights, processes, the VIM text editor, shell scripting, environment variables, SSH connections and data transfers. The breakdown of the tutorial into individual videos also enables more advanced users to easily recap certain topics if, for example, they have forgotten how to operate VIM.
The tutorial is stuctured in the following way: Background and History, The Command Line, Linux Directory Structure, Files, Text display and search, Users and ermissions, Processes, The vim text editor, Shell scripting, Environment variables, System configuration, SSH Connections, SH: Graphics and File Transfer, Various tips.
Performance analysis of applications with the GNU Profiler Gprof is the focus of this one-part tutorial. It details how to instrument applications, how performance information for an application run is generated and, finally, how to evaluate that information.
In addition, it is possible to visualize the application structure using call graphs and to annotate the source code of the application with runtime information.
Three real-world examples from the fields of biology, computer science and mechanical engineering demonstrate that this can be done with different programming languages (C / C ++, Fortran), various compilers (GNU, Intel) and even parallel applications (threads, MPI).
This course is initially aimed at beginners and later also at advanced users for shared memory parallelization of applications using OpenMP programming. The concepts are conveyed bit by bit in a total of 11 parts and cover the topics of work sharing, data scoping, tasking and non-uniform memory access.
The tutorial contains the following sections: Overview, Worksharing, Sara Scoping, False Sharing, Tasking, Tasking and Data Scoping, Tasking and Synchronization. Loops and Tasks, Task Scheduling, Non-Uniform Memory Access.
Der HPC.NRW YouTube-Kanal
In order to reach out to a broader user base, HPC.NRW YouTube-Channel was launched in addition to the HPC Wiki. On this channel, the concept and goals of HPC.NRW are explained and the four work packages, which advance the project, are presented. In addition, all previous achievements are reported and all subscribers to the channel will be kept informed of the latest news.
For example, all of the above-mentioned tutorials are also available via this channel.
The Gauß-Allianz HPC calender
The HPC calendar of the Gauß Alliance bundles courses, seminars, conferences and other events in the field of high performance computing for science and industry throughout Germany.
FH Workshop
On 08 June 2021, the first workshop offered by the competence network HPC.NRW for all universities of applied sciences in NRW took place. Among other things, the event provided an overview of HPC as well as the support options available through HPC.NRW for researchers in NRW.
The training materials can now also be viewed online.