A hobby project has become a reality for two DeiC specialist working on a daily basis with support for LUMI. Based on their experience they found that there was no adequate learning material for SLURM. “There were no great guides for new users who wanted to dive into SLURM. There was no appropriate introduction to SLURM, only manuals with massive amounts of information which can be difficult to navigate”, René Løwe Jacobsen, national HPC specialist with DeiC explains.
Making an easier shift from interactive HPC to throughout HPC
The new, virtual learning environment is intended for users who are familiar with the interface for interactive HPC and wish to improve their skills to include working with several machines at a time. To be able to do this would require you to get familiar with the queue management system “Slurm Workload Manager”.
The LUMI-C part makes use of the queue management system Slurm Workload Manager, earlier known as Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM). This system is a free and open-source job scheduler for Linux and Unix-like kernels used by many of the world's supercomputers and computer clusters.
Making the shift from DeiC Interactive HPC to DeiC Throughput HPC requires that users know how to log onto a terminal on a computer such as LUMI or another throughput facility at your university or internationally to obtain more computing power. You need to know how to work with code commands (called text prompt), and it would be an advantage if you have previously tried to create your own code. The interactive learning system will help you play around with commands and contains help texts and exercises to help you get started with the queue management system “Slurm Workload Manager”. While you are at it you are also introduced to potential pitfalls to help you avoid what not to do in SLURM.
Unique interactive learning platform
It is an interactive, online learning platform for a reason.
“From my experience you can easily be reading a book, but that does not necessarily mean that you learn it all. It’s much easier to learn from an interactive experience which has you working actively with the content. This way your learning sticks better. So far, from what we know, there is no learning platform like this available anywhere in the world, and you can try out the new virtual system already now, if you are interested. You can find the source code in GitHub and it is openly available to everyone, René Løwe Jacobsen continues.
We’ve had great help developing the learning platform from Tethys Svensson, former national HPC specialist at DeiC and Rasmus Berg Jensen, academic staff member at the Department of Chemistry at AU (now PhD student at AU) and formerly part of the EuroCC project, both with significant contributions.
“We hope that the new virtual SLURM learning environment can have even more people engage with throughput HPC with all the benefits it brings”, says Eske Christiansen, HPC Manager at DeiC.
Screen dump showcasing the virtual learning environment with prompt, help texts and exercises to the right.
Resources:
Please find the source code for DeiC's virtual SLURM learning environment here: https://github.com/DeiC-HPC/slurmlearning
For more information, feel free to contact rene.jacobsen@deic.dk
