Tutorials
HPC@LSU invites you to attend our weekly training scheduled every Wednesdays, except university holidays.
The training sessions are subject to cancellation due to lack of registrations, so please register if you plan on attending. Registration closes in the afternoon on the day prior to the training.
Click on the tutorial topic to obtain more information and registration details. Remote connect links to attend the training will be provided via email to all registered participants.
Note: The Slide and Support Materials links are placeholders until content is added after the tutorial.
Spring 2025 Training Schedule
1. January 29,2025: HPC User Environment 1
| Topic | HPC User Environment 1 |
| Date | January 29,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | This training provides an overview of the HPC/LONI general account and allocation policies, general cluster architecture and HPC hardware and software environment. Prerequisites
Slides |
| Registration | Click here |
2. February 5,2025: HPC User Environment 2
| Topic | HPC User Environment 2 |
| Date | February 5,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | This training provides an overview of the HPC hardware and software environment, queuing system, compiling programs, writing submit scripts, running and monitoring jobs on HPC systems. Prerequisites
Slides Downloads |
| Registration | Click here |
3. February 12,2025: Basic Shell Scripting
| Topic | Basic Shell Scripting |
| Date | February 12,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | For anyone who works in a Linux/Unix environment, a working knowledge of shell scripting is essential and will boost their efficiency and productivity tremendously. For this tutorial, we will focus on bash as it is one of the most popular shells. This tutorial will include topics such as creating simple bash scripts, flow control, command line arguments, regex, grep, awk and sed. This is a practical tutorial, so we will provide examples and/or hands-on exercises for most of the covered materials.
Prerequisites
Slides Downloads |
| Registration | Click here |
4. February 19,2025: Open OnDemand: Interactive HPC via the Web
| Topic | Open OnDemand: Interactive HPC via the Web |
| Date | February 19,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | This training will provide an introduction to Open OnDemand, a browser based tool now available to all LSU HPC users on campus. Open OnDemand requires only a web browser (no plug-ins) and an LSU HPC account. It features a file browser, command line shell access, job management, and access to interactive Jupyter notebooks and RStudio servers running interactively on SuperMIC's compute nodes. This training will feature an overview of Open OnDemand, and a demonstration of all it's features, including Jupyter Notebook and RStudio.
Prerequisites
Slides |
| Registration | Click here |
5. February 26,2025: Introduction to Python
| Topic | Introduction to Python |
| Date | February 26,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | Python is a high-level programming language, easy to learn yet extremely powerful. This training will provide an introduction to programming in Python. The subjects include basic Python syntax, Python classes used in object-oriented programming. Basic Python modules for scientific computing and plotting will also be introduced. During the training, simple Python programs will be provided for demonstration.
Prerequisites
Slides |
| Registration | Click here |
6. March 12,2025: Magic Tools to Install - Manage Software: Singularity Container
| Topic | Magic Tools to Install - Manage Software: Singularity Container |
| Date | March 12,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | Installing and managing software packages often poses a challange to HPC users on Linux systems without root permission. This two-part mini series is aiming at introducing helpful tools to remedy that. This part will feature container techenology and the software Singularity (a.k.a. Apptainer), a popular implementation of containers on HPC. Containers are gaining increasing popularities for its flexibility and portability. More and more developers now start to release their software packages as working containers for users' convenience. In this training, we will discuss how to use Singularity to run container images on our clusters, acquire more container images, and build your own container images. We will also showcase the usage of containerized popular packages such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. Prerequisites
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| Registration | Click here |
7. March 19,2025: Magic Tools to Install - Manage Software: Conda Virtual Environment
| Topic | Magic Tools to Install - Manage Software: Conda Virtual Environment |
| Date | March 19,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | Installing and managing software packages often poses a challange to HPC users on Linux systems without root permission. This two-part mini series is aiming at introducing helpful tools to remedy that. This part will feature virtual environments and the software Conda, a popular tool working with virtual environments. In this training, we will discuss how to use Conda and virtual environments to install and manage software packages on our clusters, including frequently requested packages such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. We will also share useful tips, such as sharing virtual environment with group members and using Conda to manage software packages beyond Python (e.g., R / Perl). Prerequisites
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| Registration | Click here |
8. April 9,2025: Introduction to GNU Parallel
| Topic | Introduction to GNU Parallel |
| Date | April 9,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | In scientific computation disciplines, such as bioinformatics and computational biology, many computational tools are serial in nature. To effectively run many serial jobs simultaneously on multi-core HPC platform can be challenging. GNU Parallel is an easy to use and also powerful tool for executing commands/tasks in parallel on one or multiple host machines. This training will introduce GNU Parallel and its basic features. Hand-on, real-world examples will be demonstrated on how to run different types of massive individual tasks using GNU Parallel.
Prerequisites
Slides Source Code |
| Registration | Click here |
9. April 16,2025: Molecular Dynamics
| Topic | Molecular Dynamics |
| Date | April 16,2025 |
| Time | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM |
| Place | Zoom Online |
| Description | Molecular dynamics simulation (MD) is a computational technique that is used to study the dynamics of molecules and atoms over time. The tutorial will discuss the essentials of the classical molecular dynamics simulations. The basic system setup, initialization, and analysis for widely used simulation packages such as LAMMPS, GROMACS, AMBER and NAMD on LONI and LSU HPC clusters will be reviewed. Prerequisites
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| Registration | Click here |
HPC Training Survey
We value your feedback, and will use your feedback to help improve our HPC training offerings. Please complete a short survey at the end of each training using this link.
Past Tutorials
We offer many tutorial sessions for our users both on campus and online. The training topics include but are not limited to:
- Introduction to Linux
- HPC user environment
- Version control with git
- Pythong and R programming
- Deep learning basics
- Parallel programming
To read descriptions or access PDF's of the slides from past tutorials Past Tutorials.