Potential HPC Intro Lab Assignments

Infrastructure

§         May need files on a floppy or network file server for use with lab exercises, better yet download from a Web Page

§         BCCD DHCP server running when using BCCD in lab

§         Cheat sheets used for this class must

o       Be comprehensible, not necessarily comprehensive

o       Terse, but understandable

o       Cite resources (web or printed) for more detail

§         Standalone (they are useful outside of class, i.e. they are usable as a resource appearing on CCC HPC website)

§         A goal is to have a cheat sheet for almost every lab

Knoppix

  1. Orientation
    1. Successfully boot
    2. Save a file on flash drive
    3. Save a file on a floppy drive
    4. Connect to the network
    5. Connect a printer
  2. A first tour of Linux commands (part 1)
    1. Introduction to Linux commands cheatsheat
  3. A first tour of Linux commands (part 2)
    1. Compiling and running
  4. Tour of the GUI side of Linux
  5. Open office
    1. Quick walkthrough of key open office tools: word processing, spreadsheet, graphing from spreadsheet, presentations
    2. There should be simple cheat sheet for each tool
  6. Documentation
    1. Man pages
    2. README
    3. Web
    4. Code
  7. Research
    1. Research a series of Internet sites and filling out a "discovery"
      form (with questions you know can be answered by hitting the right sites
      or reading the right white papers. (include hpc site and class web pages). 
    2. Possibly essay based on research about clusters (Alf’s powerpoint, computational clusters, high availability clusters(e.g. Google)) focused on issue without a right/wrong answer, which will better reflect quality of research and quality of thought
    3. Another direction for this would be to take a single well defined topic (could take a definition from HPC glossary and expand on it so person reader away with crystal understanding of the meaning of the glossary definition) and ask the student to write a 1-2 page white paper which will be put up on class website for the benefit of all students. The best of them should migrate to the HPC website for the benefit of the world.
  8. Linux Administration - Networking
  9. Linux Administration – Managing users

 

 

BCCD (Bootable Cluster CD from Paul Gray)

  1. Orientation
    1. Successfully boot
    2. Save a file on flash drive
    3. Save a file on a floppy drive
    4. Connect to the network
    5. Connect a printer
  2. Compiling a cluster app and running it
  3. Looking at MPI source code
  4. Benchmarking
    1. Basics of computational science: are parameters proportional or inversely proportional or do they exhibit some other behavior.
    2. Use OpenOffice to record and graph execution times as you vary parameters and the number of nodes assigned to a job
    3. Show how communication overhead will make it worse to add nodes at some point
  5. Cluster networking issues
    1. Physical issues
    2. Hooking things up
    3. Maintaining the network
  6. theoretical networking issues
    1. latency and bandwidth
    2. Run series of demos stressing system different ways and illustrating various kinds of bottlenecks
  7. Security
    1. Ssh commands
    2. Shutting off Linux services
  8. Recovery
    1. Using Knoppix or BCCD as a rescue CD
    2. Recovery issues: mounting file systems, accessing files, repairing files, windows issues, ethics (increased access)