Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

In the beginner's course, we provided an introduction to VPAC itself, what hardware and software we have installed, how to use our helpdesk system, the Linux environment, secure file transfers, file editing and manipulation, environment modules, the Portable Batch System (PBS), Grid Australia, and three HPC tutorials; one for NAMD and VMD (life sciences), one for Abaqus (engineering) and one for R, using Grisu (for mathematics).

Before attempting this intermediate course, it is important that you are very familiar with all of the above. If you are not it is recommended that you have some revision first, because many of the concepts contained in this course are quite advanced and depend on a thorough knowledge of the beginner's course.

In this course, you will initially learn a little more about VPAC, including its governance, other facilities, and the Client and Application Services department. Following this is an introduction to login files, advanced text-editing, archiving, ownership and permissions, output and command redirections, more file manipulation and program manipulation.

The course will then describe regular expressions, shells and shell scripting, resource management in HPC systems, and give further examples of PBS scripts which involve launching multiple jobs.

Finally the course will discuss compiling one's own applications, and specifically MPI programs, with comparisons between different compilers on an HPC system.

This course is free to staff and students at VPAC Member Universities, however, booking in advance is essential. Please book your place by selecting a session from the list to the right of this page or for extra information, contact training@vpac.org or phone +61 3 9925 4410.

This course will be held at 110 Victoria Street, Carlton (Ground Floor, Building 91, RMIT)