“Kickstart your HPC Journey” with a Cluster Challenge
In May 2022,
DiRAC and
UCL collaborated under the
DiRAC Federation Project activity to run a student cluster challenge, with the aim of developing a framework for the HPC community to grow undergraduate and graduate students’ interest in pursuing a career in HPC. Promoted under the strapline ‘Kickstart your HPC Journey”, the project produced a guide and supporting suite of resources as a toolkit to enable any institution in the community to set up and run an HPC Cluster challenge.
Preparing for the Challenge
All the resources needed to prepare for and facilitate a Cluster Challenge have been collated into an open source github repository which can be accessed
here.
The resources include:
Practical co-ordination advice
Examples of advertising and promotional material
Registration & feedback forms
Agenda and timetables
Comprehensive advice on training pre-requisites and a list of recommended training resources
Advice on hardware requirements, set up and on-boarding users
Advice on classroom set up
Guide to establishing an HPC Slack platform
Setting up a HackMD with instructions for downloading the challenges and running a job
Advice on mentors and helpers for the event
A post-event lessons learned document
The Challenges
Two challenges were created for the event at different levels of technical difficulty, with both taking the form of accelerating an N-Body simulation. The physics is high-school level, requiring some understanding of the gravitational forces between two objects, but no deep mathematical knowledge. The numerical methods used to advance the equations in time may be new to some participants but they are quick and easy to explain.
The first challenge code simulates the gravitational interaction between many astronomical bodies and includes two examples, a version of our solar system and a completely randomised solar system with as many planets (or bodies) as you like. With this algorithm being well suited to parallelisation, the object of the challenge is to speed up the computationally intensive part of the code using HPC.
The second challenge code simulates
Rayleigh-Bénard convection, where fluid in a box is heated from below and (since heat rises) we get convection. The fluid is represented by three variables: temperature, vorticity and a ‘stream function’ and the object of the challenge is to simulate the evolution of these three variables by solving three equations as quickly as possible.
These challenges are provided as fully functional, serial Python code, with a suite of robust tests that the students can use to verify their results.
Accessing the github
Additional Event: Careers Day
The Cluster Challenge event was designed to introduce participants to HPC and parallel programming and encourage more students to consider HPC as a career. To highlight both the wide range of research domains and industries currently using HPC, and the corresponding opportunities that are available, DiRAC-UCL also hosted a pre-event Careers Day webinar hosted on Zoom.
The webinar included presentations from 11 speakers with 2 panel sessions. Speakers in the morning talked about how they have used HPC in their research or other careers and why it is an increasingly important resource. Speakers in the afternoon presented more detail on their careers in HPC, to demonstrate the opportunities in different sectors.
Guidance and resources for running a Careers Day are also available in the github repository, along with recordings of the speaker and panel sessions.
Questions & Acknowledgements
Please don’t forget to acknowledge DiRAC, UCL and Kickstart Challenge by using our logos and let us know if you run your own event. If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements to the resources please get in touch with DiRAC’s Training Manager
Richard Regan.
DiRAC was awarded UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure funding to support this work under Phase 1 of the DiRAC Federation Project.
