VPAC offer courses on subjects ranging from code optimisation to advanced parallel programming. These courses are designed to provide the programming skills necessary to use VPAC resources effectively and efficiently.
The following VPAC Courses can be conducted at VPAC or off-site at one of VPAC’s Member Universities:
Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced Linux and HPC courses are delivered by VPAC staff. Course sponsorship is available for staff and students from VPAC Member Universities, however, booking in advance is essential. Researchers from non-Member institutions should contact training@vpac.org for information on costs and payment options.
All VPAC courses incorporate both lectures and extensive hands-on sessions. Programming exercises are carefully designed to reinforce concepts and techniques taught in class. VPAC Instructors have strong technical backgrounds and are available for individual consultation, including help with participants' own coding needs, during course sessions. To register for a course please follow the course link for more information and select a session time.
Introductory Linux and HPC Course
The Introductory HPC and Linux course is designed to cater for a wide range of computer skill sets; we'll provide 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, and the Portable Batch System (PBS).
After working through the basic operations, and job submission sections, an advanced sections users will be given the chance to work through tutorials where they can submit a simple jobs to the cluster using a molecular dynamics program, NAMD, the statistical package, R, and a finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics application, Ansys. Each of these will outline and emphasise the basic workflow procedure for submitting high performance computing jobs.
Intermediate Linux and HPC 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 with vim, archiving, ownership and permissions of files, and more advanced examples output and command redirections, file manipulation, and program manipulation.
The course will then describe regular expressions, shells and shell scripting, the text manipulation programs sed and awk, 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.
Advanced Linux and HPC Course
Before attempting this advanced course, familiarity is required with the introductory and intermediate courses. It is essential that the attendee has a working familiarity with C and Fortran as well. It is recommended that you have some revision first, because many of the concepts contained in this course are quite advanced.
In this course, information is initially given about quotas and projects at VPAC. Following this is a review of computer architectures, principles of parallelisation, use of C and Fortran, OpenMPI, MPI functions and datatypes, communicators, messages, deadlocks, use of wildcards, collective communications, profiling, latency hiding, and derived datatypes.
Lustre Installation and Administration
Lustre is presented at VPAC as a commercial training seminar through our partnership with Whamcloud.
The course is conducted over three days and includes an introduction to the filesystem, designing Lustre clusters, implementation and configuration, client configuration and setip, filesystem backup and restoration, advanced networking, troubleshooting. The course includes interactive lab sessions.
Current Courses
Please note our upcoming training courses for 2013
Contact Us
For further information regarding any of our training courses, please contact training@vpac.org or phone +61 3 9925 4410.