Welcome

Welcome and congratulations on joining the HPC team. This is the HPC Training Book which contains the training material which will be used to train you in many of the preliminary HPC concepts required to participate in the HPC branch and in MDN as a whole. Throughout this book you will learn the basics of the C programming language, parallel and distributed computing and job batching. You will complete challenges across the weeks to test your knowledge and give you the opportunity to practice your skills.

What is HPC?

HPC stands for high performance computing. In involves using extremely powerful machines to perform complex tasks. It combines aspects of network management, parallel computing techniques and distributed computers to solve highly complex problems. The main focus of HPC is to build and use computer clusters; collections or grids of powerful computers that can communicate information between each other, to solve advanced computational problems that involve a lot of data or process power and time.

HPC at Monash DeepNeuron

The HPC branch at Monash DeepNeuron works on many different projects. Everything from creating mini clusters, to using supercomputer clusters to simulate complex, real world systems for research and technology development in may different scientific disciplines. Within the HPC branch you will learn a lot about HPC development starting with the foundational concepts and ideas involved in HPC to working on various projects that implement and utilise these techniques in order to solve many different complex problems.

HPC Training

What is all this and what is it for?

This is a book. More specifically it is the book containing all the content, training resources and learning materials that you will be using to complete you HPC training. The purpose of this book is to provide clear and concise learning resources that you can utilise effectively; not just in your HPC training, but for the entirety of your time at Monash DeepNeuron.

What are you going to learn?

During your HPC training, you are going to learn all about HPC concepts and various tools that exist that allow us to perform HPC development. You will start with the setup process which involves downloading some tools you will be using throughout your training as well as creating a GitHub account. You will then learn about the C programming language and to effectively use it to create powerful and fast computer programs. You will then gain access to M3; Monash's cluster environment, where you will learn hwo to distribute jobs across one or many different computers. You'll also learn about concepts involved in parallel and distributed computing and development programs using these techniques to improve the speed of software applications.

Along the way you will learn how to effectively use developer tools like Git and GitHub as well as solving various challenges each week to test and practice what you have learnt in each chapter.

How to use this book

Using the book is pretty self explanatory. The content is split up into chapters which covers a particular topic which can be further broken down sections. You navigate through the book mostly chronologically using the arrow buttons on either side of the page (can't miss them). You can also look through the chapters and sections to find particular topics or using the search bar, which can be activated by pressing S. Each chapter has a challenges section. These contain various tasks to complete related to the content of each chapter.

Contributing

You can contribute to the book by accessing its GitHub repository (GitHub log in the top right hand corner of any page). Follow the contributing guidelines on the repository for more details.