Category: Tools

The Tools category contains blog articles covering a variety of tools that may be useful in our teaching, training and outreach activities. This includes tools specific to HPC, as well as, more general tools useful in content creation, learners engagement etc.

The OpenHPC2.x Virtual Lab – a hands-on reflection.

written by Sayfullah Jumoorty

I recently had the opportunity to complete the OpenHPC 2.x Hands-On Lab (Virtual Lab 10), presented by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), and it was an invaluable experience.

The lab focused on deploying and managing a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster using the OpenHPC software stack, including Warewulf, Slurm, and RockyLinux8. Over the course of the lab, I set up management nodes, configured compute nodes, and ran jobs in a virtual environment, all while troubleshooting and optimizing the cluster’s performance.

“One of the highlights of the lab was its practical, step-by-step approach, which made complex HPC concepts more accessible.”

As a student at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), I’ve been actively involved in HPC through local competitions in South Africa and had the privilege of representing my team at the ISC 2023 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg.

The hands-on experience from this OpenHPC lab directly complemented the skills I developed in those competitions, allowing me to deepen my understanding of real-world cluster deployment and system administration.

One of the highlights of the lab was its practical, step-by-step approach, which made complex HPC concepts more accessible. The opportunity to get hands-on with a virtual cluster environment was both challenging and rewarding.

For anyone interested in HPC, whether you’re an experienced system administrator or a newcomer like me, I highly recommend this lab as a learning experience.

I’m excited to stay connected with the HPC community and look forward to further contributing as I continue my journey in this field! -Sayfullah Jumoorty (sayfullah.jumoorty[at]live[dot]com)

The OpenHPC2.x Virtual Lab is designed to provide an offline locally-hosted learning environment to explore the deployment (and use of) a 3-node virtual cluster. To find out more about the OpenHPC 2.x Virtual Lab:

HPC Certification Program – the HPC environment survey

Jean-Thomas Acquaviva, DDN Storage

Supercomputers are helping us to solve the world greatest challenges but who is helping us to harness the computational power of supercomputers?

The HPC Certification Forum is a community effort that aims to provide an international certification program for the skills needed by practitioners  to harness supercomputers. The HPC Certification Forum aims to clearly categorise, define, and examine competencies, which will be beneficial to all stake-holders involved in training and education.  To make this effort relevant to the whole HPC community,  a number of on-line surveys and polls will be created in order to capture and estimate the importance of various tools, technologies and skills that are expected from HPC practitioners. 

Continue reading “HPC Certification Program – the HPC environment survey”

Unity 3: Lorenz Butterfly

David Joiner, Kean University

The Lorenz system is a widely studied example of a chaotic system. It’s classically simple, needing only three coupled equations to exhibit a variety of types of traditionally chaotic behavior. First described by Lorenz in 1963, the system was initially designed as a simplified model of convection in the atmosphere. Continue reading “Unity 3: Lorenz Butterfly”