Learning Outcomes

This workshop is broken up into 4 sections, or weeks. Each week will have a 2-hour session where we will go over the material for that week and any questions you may have.

Week 1

This is the most introductory week, to provide a foundation of learning so that everyone is on a level playing field. We'll go over what Unix is and why we use a Unix system on the clusters. Then, we'll go through some basic Unix commands to learn how to navigate the cluster interface. These commands include ls and cd (which list and change directories respectively). If you already know your way around a Unix/Linux system/terminal, feel free to skip this first week and join us again for the more advanced weeks.

Week 2

This week, we move to the supercomputers to learn what they are, how they are made up, and how to use them. If you or your group already has access to a cluster account, it's a good idea to follow along on there, but if you don't have access to the cluster this will be more of a lecture rather than an interactive lab. We'll learn commands such as scp to copy files to and from the clusters, as well as ones like sbatch to submit resource requests to the clusters.

Week 3

In week 3, we'll learn about advanced Unix topics, such as scripting and shell scripts. We'll also learn about managing processes, program outputs, and files. We'll talk about different commands, like chmod, which modifies the permissions of a file/directory, or the kill command, which send signals to processes. We'll learn about environment variables and how they affect your shell. Lastly, we'll talk about archiving and finding files.

Week 4

In this last week, we'll talk about advanced cluster topics. We'll go in depth about file storage and where you can store your files. We'll also talk about using multiple nodes on a single job. We'll also discuss viewing your job history and statistics, as well as how to monitor your resource utilization. We'll end the workshop series with a brief discussion about managing workloads and jobs, with the different paradigms available to use.