Introduction to High-Performance Computing: Glossary

High Performance Computing (HPC) typically involves connecting to very large computing systems elsewhere in the world.

These other systems can be used to do work that would either be impossible or much slower or smaller systems.

The standard method of interacting with such systems is via a command line interface called Bash.

To connect to a cluster using SSH: ssh yourUsername@remote.computer.address

A shell script is just a list of bash commands in a text file.

chmod +x script.sh will give it permission to execute.

A cluster is a set of networked machines.

Clusters typically provide a login node and a set of worker nodes.

Files saved on one node are available everywhere.

Load software with module load softwareName

Unload software with module purge

The module system handles software versioning and package conflicts for you automatically.

You can edit your .bashrc file to automatically load a software package.

wget downloads a file from the internet.

sftp/scp transfer files to and from your computer.

You can use an SFTP client like FileZilla to transfer files through a GUI.

The smaller your job, the faster it will schedule.

Don’t run stuff on the login node.

Again, don’t run stuff on the login node.

Don’t be a bad person and run stuff on the login node.