Training

For the users of the Peregrine cluster two courses are available. A basic and more advanced one. The basic course is given monthly, the advanced one twice per year. The details of the courses are given below. All material (slides, exercises) of both courses can be found on the Course material page.

For questions about the courses you can contact us at hpc@rug.nl.

Often the power of the desktop PC or laptop is not enough to perform simulations or analyses of huge datasets. The Peregrine cluster with more than 5000 cpu cores can help you in tackling this problem. In this four hour course you will learn how to work with this system.

The following topics will be discussed:

• What the cluster can do for you
• How to get access to the system
• How to work with the Linux command-line environment
• How to transfer data to and from the cluster
• How to find, and get access to the available software
• How to start and monitor calculations on the cluster

The course has been split in two parts. The first part addresses logging in to the system and the use of the Linux environment. The second part will discuss the setup of the cluster, the available software and starting real calculations. For people who already have knowledge about the Linux command-line environment it is possible to only attend the second part.

The course will be a mixture of lectures and hands-on exercises, in which you will work with the concepts explained.

After the course you should understand what a computer cluster is, how to log in to the system, how to work with the command-line environment, be able to transfer data, and submit calculations as jobs to the system.

No knowledge about clusters or Linux necessary. All examples are based on (free to download and use) software already available on the university Windows desktops. Pointers to alternative software will be given for Mac and Linux users.

The course is given monthly, except for the summer period. The courses are given in the afternoon from 13:00 to 17:00. The following dates are planned for now:

• Wednesday, January 19 Registration link
• Tuesday, February 15 Registration link
• Thursday, March 17 Registration link
• Wednesday, April 13 Registration link
• Tuesday, May 17 Registration link
• Thursday, June 16 Registration link

The dates for the 2nd half of 2022 will be added before summer.

Please be aware that filling in the registration form requires logging in to your RUG account. If you would like to attend the course, but don't have a RUG account, please contact us at hpc@rug.nl.

In this four hour course, which is a follow-up to the Peregrine introduction course, an overview of several parallelization and job handling methods will be given. This will help you in making a more effective use of the Peregrine cluster.

The following topics will be discussed:

• Some details of modern system architecture;
• Differences between shared and distributed memory parallelization;
• Introduction to bash scripting for writing advanced job scripts;
• Job arrays, submitting many jobs at the same time.

The course will focus on getting familiar with the concepts, not on a thorough explanation of all the details, as the latter would not fit in a single afternoon.

The course will be a mixture of lectures and hands-on exercises, in which you will work with the concepts explained.

After the course you should be able to understand how to work with shared memory or distributed memory applications on the cluster. You should be able to write more advanced job scripts that make it possible to automate job tasks. Finally you should be able to perform parameter sweeps using job arrays.

For this course basic knowledge about the Linux command line, and the Peregrine cluster is assumed.

The course is twice per year. The courses are given in the afternoon from 13:00 to 17:00. The following dates are planned for now:

• Thursday, April 21 Registration link

The dates for the 2nd half of 2022 will be added before summer.