DeapSECURE module 1: Introduction to HPC

Supercomputers are a collection of smaller computers into one big unit

HPC is used in various domains, pretty much everywhere a computer could be used to solve a problem

HPC helps get results faster than traditional computing.

Spam is an unsolicited email that contains unwanted advertisements, requests, or enticements.

Different types of spam emails include: unsolicited advertisements, scam, phishing, email with malicious payload.

Spam poses cybersecurity risks through stealing personal information, malicious software, and system break-in.

Powerful supercomputers can tremendously reduce the time to process massive amounts of data through parallel processing.

An HPC cluster is remotely accessed using secure shell

UNIX shell provides a basic means to interact with HPC systems

pwd, cd, and ls provides essential means to navigate around files and directories

Directories and files are addressed by their paths, which can be relative or absolute

Basic file management tools: mkdir, cp, mv, rm, rmdir

Basic text viewing and editing tools: cat, less, nano

echo prints a message.

wc counts the number of lines, words, and bytes in a file.

head prints the first few lines of a text file.

tail prints the last few lines of a text file.

cut selects a particular column or columns of text data from a text file.

sort sorts lines of text.

uniq prints the unique lines of text.

grep filters lines of text matching a given text pattern.

A script is a text file containing a sequence of commands

The for statement takes a list and run commands for each of the elements in the list by iterating through the list items

The if statements are used to execute commands based on given conditions

A spam database is a collection of spam emails that have been gathered over many years to provide a representation of spam circulating on the Internet.

A spam database such as the SPAM Archive is helpful to study the characteristics of spam emails, including their origins.

The origin of an email can be determined from the IP address recorded in the tracking information in the email’s header.

An IP address can be mapped to a geographic location using an appropriate database.

A job script is used to launch a computation job on an HPC system.

A large job can be split into smaller jobs to reduce the time to solution.

GNU parallel is suitable for executing many single-node jobs that are independent of each others.

GNU parallel automates parallel execution of multiple jobs.

Simple UNIX tools such as cut, sort, head, tail and uniq are helpful to analyze text results.