DeapSECURE module 1: Introduction to HPC

This is the first module of ODU’s DeapSECURE cyberinfrastructure training. This module contains the introduction to High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters, complemented with many hands-on exercises. First, we introduce what an HPC is, then how to access an HPC system (ODU Wahab cluster). Next, we will present a crash course, or refresher, on UNIX shell. We will use the UNIX shell knowledge to write a simple pipeline to process a very large number of spam emails and obtain some statistical knowledge about them. Our final goal in this module is to perform basic analysis on a massive set of spam emails.

Prerequisites

Basic computer interactions, students should know how to interact with a computer using a keyborad.

Basic concepts such as directories, files, and paths.

Basic text editing skills. Students should know how to input text, issue commands…

Schedule

	Setup	Download files required for the lesson
00:00	1. Introduction to High-Performance Computing	What is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) system? Who uses HPC systems? Why HPC?
00:10	2. Spam: Everyone's Cybersecurity Issue	What is a spam? What the different types of spam? What are the problems posed by spam? How does spam indicate cybersecurity problems? Why do we need a powerful supercomputer to analyze a massive collection of spam emails?
00:20	3. Accessing HPC	How do we access a modern HPC system? How do we interact with a basic HPC interface?
00:30	4. Basic Shell Interaction	How do we interact with a UNIX shell, the basic HPC interface? What is a file system? How do we navigate around files and directories from a UNIX shell? How do we manage files and directories from a UNIX shell? How do we work with text files from a UNIX shell? How do we get help on UNIX shell commands?
01:20	5. Text Processing Tools & Pipeline	How do we process text-based information using UNIX tools? How do we build a processing pipeline by combining UNIX tools?
01:50	6. Task Automation with Scripts	How can we repeat the same or similar set of commands over and over?
02:15	7. Investigating the Origin of Spam Emails	What is a spam database? What are the uses of spam database? How do we trace the origin of an email based on its header information?
02:30	8. Running Spam Analyzer on a High-Performance Computer System	How do we run computational jobs on a modern HPC system?
03:00	9. Using HPC for Parallel Processing	How do we run computational jobs in parallel on a modern HPC system? What are key issues to watch out to achieve efficient parallel execution on HPC?
03:30	10. Using GNU Parallel on HPC	What is GNU Parallel? What are the characteristics of suitable jobs for GNU Parallel? How do we run multiple jobs simultaneously using GNU Parallel?
04:00	11. Analyzing and Summarizing the Distribution of Spam Origins	How do we analyze and summarize HPC results? What is the distribution of the origins of spam emails in Spam Archive?
04:45	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.