HPC Cloud Tutorial

• General Information
  
• Preparation
  
• Hands-on
  
  • Part A
  • Part B
  • Part C
  • Extras

General Information

SURFsara has been operating the HPC Cloud as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for several years. The HPC Cloud service offers users access to fast computing nodes and high-performant big storage volumes through a powerful graphical user interface. The underlying cluster Oort is managed by the OpenNebula cloud management software.

This tutorial introduces a user to the HPC Cloud, by providing a set of lectures and hands-on examples to be run on the Oort infrastructure.

You can follow it at your own pace.

Preparation

You are expected to use a laptop with Internet connection and a browser installed.

Prior experience with Linux commands will help but not a prerequisite.

For this workshop you will need:

• A computer with Internet access
• A browser (Chrome or Firefox will do nicely)
• An SSH client
  • Linux and Mac users: don’t have to install anything. The SSH client is on board, try “ssh” in a terminal.
  • Windows users: download and install git for windows. Depending on your OS installation, choose between the -32-bit.exe or the -64-bit.exe.
• An X-window client
  • Linux and Mac users: usually don’t need to install anything as X11 is on board. However, the newest Mac OS releases might not have X11.app installed. In such a case, install XQuartz.
  • Windows users: install Xming.

NOTE for Windows users:

For the Extras you may need to start a graphical window in your laptop that is connected to your HPC Cloud machine. To make this work, you need to adjust the following:

• Open GitBash (or git for windows).
• In the terminal that appears, copy and paste the following commands:

# press enter to submit each command
echo "export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0" >> $HOME/.bashrc
source $HOME/.bashrc

Hands-on

The hands-on tutorial consists of three parts:

• Parts A & B provide exercises for you to grasp the basic concepts on how to operate in the HPC Cloud environment.
• Partc C helps rounding off a few recommendations.

• The Extras part will focus on advanced topics, namelly parallel programming and automation, where you will exercise yourself on the HPC Cloud.

• Part A
• Part B
• Part C
• Extras