High Performance Computing for the Wolfson Institute Population Health

If you go to run every morning, or drive to work on weekdays, you should know that every journey is unique. For me, every High Performance Computing (HPC) workshop I deliver has its own personality. The audience, the material tailored to each audience, the interactions and questions, and of course, the energy of the community. Last Thursday September 26, an HPC workshop for the Wolfson Institute of Population Health was held from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The seminar includes, as usual, presentations, coffee break, quiz and treats, and the photographs to make it memorable.

Topics

Samantha Lawson (Sam) and myself were the speakers this time. We both belong to the ITS Research team at Queen Mary University of London. I started the explanation from the basics, explaining why you need HPC and when. Followed by presenting the infrastructure of the cluster, how you can store and manage data in the cluster, handle the HPC computational resources to launch HPC jobs, and to monitoring them.

We had approximately 37 researchers from the Wolfson Institute of Population Health (WIPH) among postgraduate students and staff. Most of our attendees used Windows and were not familiar with the Linux console and commands. For that reason, we thought that the most convenient tool to start them into the HPC world could be by training them to use OnDemand, the GUI to use HPC. Sam showed a couple of demonstrations that included the use of RStudio2022 and of Jupyter on OnDemand. She completed her presentation by highlighting the good practices in OnDemand, and the common mistake that users do in OnDemand, which is not deleting their instances after completing their HPC jobs.

Reward Quiz

This time we did an online anonymous quiz at the end of the 3-hour session to measure how much information the audience absorbed. I should mention that throughout the event, people were able to ask questions anonymously as well. Mentimeter and Slido were very useful for this purpose. The quiz was very popular in the event, we knew this because we had very positive feedback from the anonymous survey. As a professional I felt that it was a very rewarding experience. I try to make the workshops both learnable and also enjoyable for the participants. At the end of the day, you will not remember the options of the commands seen, but what you will definitely remember is the willingness to learn more about HPC, and the feeling of satisfaction to make your research better thanks to HPC. Congratulations to Matt who was the winner as he replied the questions not only correctly, but also faster.

The group

We booked three rooms at Dept. W, 1.20, 1.21 and 1.22. We had a full house, and we shared a coffee break that allowed networking and exchange ideas about the work at the Wolfson Institute and how ITSR can support their researchers. Thanks to this amazing group that was very eager to learn, asking questions, and with a positive attitude to learning.