Training – SIGHPC Education Blog

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:

JOCSE paper: Let’s Get Our Heads Out of the Clouds: here.
OpenHPC 2.x online guide: OpenHPC 2.x Guide.
Community Website: https://ecosystems.nicis.ac.za/
E-mail: hpc-ecosystems[at]csir[dot]co[dot]za.

Teach the Teacher at SC22

written by Dhruva Chakravorty

On November 12, 2022 at the Supercomputing 22 conference at Kay Bailey Hutchison Conference Center in Dallas, Texas, HPRC, in partnership with Edward J Evans, Associate Vice President for Enterprise IT Operations at Texas A&M University, conducted a teacher hands-on symposium. Sixteen teachers registered for the event. These teachers represented career and technical education, computer science, technology applications, health science, and business technology from middle schools and high schools in Texas. There were eleven attendees.

HPC Education & Training Materials Survey Highlights Interest in Sharing Materials More Widely

written by Kate Cahill

The utilization of computing technologies is rapidly expanding in many sectors, necessitating access to high-quality education and training materials to facilitate research computing. The demand for instructional materials, encompassing a wide range of topics related to the development and application of research computing technologies across disciplines, is crucial for both formal classroom settings, informal training, and self-paced learning.

One way to meet this need and keep up with the ever-evolving landscape of HPC educational and training material development is to improve how the community shares and finds materials.

Menlo-Atherton High School’s First Ever Coding Career Conference

Hi again! For a quick reminder, my name is Amelia and I am a sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High School (M-A) in Atherton, California. Last year, I founded the Menlo-Atherton Coding Club for Teens – a school club designed to teach coding languages to both members and younger kids in the community. Currently, we host two sessions a week over Zoom as our club has expanded to over 45 active members! A senior at M-A teaches Go (a programming language designed by Google that is similar to C) for the first session, and I partnered with a college student to teach Python for the second session. A few months ago, we had the chance to represent the M-A Coding Club in person for Club Rush, where due to Covid-19 students drove through carpool to learn about the different clubs on campus. Below is an image of me along with two club members at Club Rush.

In April of 2021, I led M-A’s First Ever Coding Career Conference- a two day conference where over 40 students joined to hear about different career paths in the computer science area. I had this idea a few months ago as I personally am interested in learning about jobs in the technology sector, and thought about how other students must be interested too! The mini conference over Zoom was centered around the theme of the advantages and disadvantages of tech jobs at big companies versus small companies.

Virtual Workshop: Toward a globally acknowledged and free HPC Certification

by Weronika Filinger

The HPC Certification Forum has been around for almost 2 years now so it’s only natural that the scope of its activities is beginning to shift from the necessary groundwork towards an actual certification. Although a lot still needs to be done in terms of refining the skill description, identifying the gaps in the defined skills, and creating a sufficiently big poll of examination questions, it is crucial now to get more support from the HPC education and training community. For the HPC Certification to work as envisioned, it needs to be recognised, and we believe that for that to happen it must be a community driven effort.

Normally, the Forum meets face-to-face twice a year – at ISC and SC conferences. The ISC meeting had to be cancelled due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, and so the Forum decided to hold a virtual workshop in mid May. To make it possible for the international members from the regions of America, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand to participate, two sessions were organised. The presentations, besides the introduction – providing the context, and the last talk – focusing on the certification process, included talks from both organisations that already collaborate with the Forum and those who would like to do so in the future.