Workshops Archive

Let’s Get Our Heads Out of the Clouds (A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to HPC Training Labs for Resource Constrained Environments and Anyone Else Stuck in the Clouds)

Workshop: Tenth SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education

Authors: Bryan Johnston, Lara Timm, and Mabatho Hashatsi (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR); ACE Lab, Centre for High Performance Computing, South Africa) and Eugene de Beste (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa; ACE Lab, Centre for High Performance Computing)

Abstract: The training of new and existing HPC practitioners is recognized as a priority in the HPC community. Traditionally, delivering HPC System Administrator training has been through physical face-to-face workshops, using cloud-based services or remote hardware to provide compute resources to emulate an HPC system.

We have identified several challenges associated with the reliance on cloud-based services for hosting HPC training workshops, including: class size is limited by the available compute resources provided on the hosted resource; the training is a non-starter without available cloud resources; the hosted resources are temporary.

To address these fundamental problems associated with the traditional cloud-hosted HPC Labs, and by following lessons learned from MOOC & Educational methodology on developing HPC Training, we have produced a reproducible, offline-capable, self-paced HPC virtual training lab that emulates a basic 3-node compute cluster on a trainee’s local machine without the need for any high-end computing resources or cloud infrastructure.

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