EuroCC Spain RES has developed this short self-paced course, "Introduction to Supercomputing for SMEs," as an entry-level introduction to the use of supercomputers.
A supercomputer is a computing system made up of a large set of processors interconnected by a high-capacity network, capable of working together to solve a common problem. These systems are housed in data centers, both public and private, which manage and administer them, providing users with all the available computing power.
- OBJECTIVES
- Introduce the student to the world of supercomputers, explaining the essential concepts to understand the architecture and operation of these systems at the user level.
- Provide students with the basic skills to use large supercomputers efficiently and easily.
- Show the benefits of using this technology to improve the competitiveness of small and medium-sized companies that need computing or data management.
- Present the supercomputing resources accessible to companies, both nationally and internationally.
- METHODOLOGY
The course is structured around videos that present the theoretical concepts, supplemented by a set of notes specifically designed for this purpose. Furthermore, students can assess their progress through a series of automatically graded test questions.
- COURSE CONTENT
- What is supercomputing? Motivation for using supercomputing. Definition and characteristics. Advantages and problems.
- Use cases. Simulations, mathematical/scientific/health calculations, Services, Artificial Intelligence.
- Taxonomy of parallel computers. Shared memory architecture: multi-core nodes. Distributed memory architecture: clusters. Heterogeneous systems: GPUs.
- Cluster architecture. Data center infrastructure: security, power, cooling. Compute nodes: servers. Interconnection network. Storage: NFS
- Access to supercomputers. Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). Nodes that make up the RES. Protocol for accessing RES resources o Private providers.
- Using a cluster. Access to the front-end. Application execution: queue manager. Management of input and output files.
- Programming model. Message passing paradigm.
