High-performance computing (HPC) is a fundamental technology used to solve a wide range of scientific research problems. Many important challenges in science such as protein folding, drug discovery, and tumour evolution, all depend on simulations, models and analyses run on HPC facilities to make progress.

This course introduces HPC to life science researchers, focusing on the aspects that are most important for those new to this technology to understand. It will help you judge how HPC can best benefit your research, and equip you to go on to successfully and efficiently make use of HPC facilities in future. The course will cover basic concepts in HPC hardware, software, user environments, filesystems, and programming models. It also provides an opportunity to gain hands-on practical experience and assistance using an HPC system (MARENOSTRUM) through examples drawn from the life sciences, such as biomolecular simulation.

The course is organised and funded by PerMedCoE - the HPC/Exascale Centre of Excellence in Personalised Medicine, and BioExcel - the Centre of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research (http://bioexcel.eu), using MareNostrum, part of the Spanish supercomputing network (https://www.bsc.es/marenostrum/marenostrum).

Who is this course for?

Life science researchers who are new to high performance computing

What will I learn?

Learning outcomes

On completion of the course, we expect that attendees will be able to:

• Explain the drivers and motivation to use HPC
• Describe the European HPC landscape and HPC facilities available to researchers
• Identify HPC hardware - Building blocks and architectures
• Define Parallel computing - Programming models and implementations
• Use HPC systems
  • Access
  • Batch schedulers & resource allocation
  • Running jobs
  • Dealing with errors
  • Compiling code
  • Using libraries
  • Performance

Trainers