What are we doing in Budapest?
NIIF Institute, Budapest
The first two weeks of Summer of HPC in Budapest, I spent configuring my newly installed Linux distribution. I was using Linux in a Virtual Box under Windows for a long time, but finally I decided to give it a try as my main operating system. I documented this adventure:
I am not the only one experiencing difficulties with Linux. Here is a wonderful article summarizing many of the problems of Linux distros in 2015:
I decided to try OpenSUSE 13.2. My experience has resulted in three bug reports. On the side, I learned a lot about Linux development and how it all works within the community. It turned out that using Linux as primary OS is not as easy and delightful as expected, but since I am an advocate of Open-Source software I am still happy to have it. There are many positives of Linux in everyday life. The most important for me is probably the feeling of having complete control over my system. Now, after a few weeks, I have been getting used to it more and more and I’m not thinking of switching back to Windows, although I am still lacking some basic functionality with Linux.
Our work up until now was mostly oriented on self-study. There have been several topics I gained deeper understanding in. We were playing with the SLURM scheduler a lot, which is an open-source workload manager designed for Linux clusters of all sizes. At NIIF, our Summer of HPC destination, it is used for scheduling jobs on all of the six available supercomputers. You can read more about it on their website. For visualization we are going to use TurboVNC, so I also did some studying on that. We will use TurboVNC to access the visualization nodes on the supercomputers we are going to work with.
dr. Hornos, Tamás, giving a talk about basic Bash scripting.
Besides the already mentioned topics, I finally had time to familiarize myself with the different HPC topics I wanted to explore for a long time but didn’t have the time to. Now I know a lot more on OpenMP and MPI programming than before, but nevertheless I find newer solutions to parallel programming such as Chapel even more exciting. Chapel is a new programming language that focuses on parallel computing. It abandons the concepts of SPMD (single program, multiple data) computing used in MPI and Co-Array Fortran. In SPMD languages, one program is executed on many cores. Chapel uses a different approach, enabling a more natural and “traditional” programming experience for the user as well as improved portability of written code. I encourage you to look it up here.
Next week we are going to prepare the actual calculations. I am very much looking forward to it.
Laptop-free weekend in Budapest
GNU/Linux FTW!