Introducing Graham, SHARCNET's Newest Cluster
Description: This half-day session will provide an introduction to the National Computational systems (GP1-3 and LP) in Compute Canada. These systems, which are accommodated in four National Advanced Research Computing sites, provide all Canadian researchers with high-performance computing and storage systems. This session will focus on GP3 system, named Graham, which is being installed in the University of Waterloo by SHARCNET. Graham is a large heterogeneous cluster with up to 19,000 CPU cores, hundreds of GPU devices, and 15PB of disk. It is also intended to be a high level primer for those largely new to HPC, and serve as a foundation upon which to build over the coming days. Topics will include how to use Graham, motivation for HPC, essential issues, problem characteristics as they apply to parallelism and a high level overview of parallel programming models. Strategies of running large sets of serial processes using e.g. GNU parallel, will also be presented if time permitted.
Instructor:Isaac Ye, SHARCNET, York University.
Prerequisites: Basic Linux/Unix skills including command line interface are useful to follow along.
Course materials: TBP.
