Introduction to Gadi - UNSW

Gadi is Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, a highly parallel cluster comprising more than 180,000 processor cores on ten different types of compute nodes. Gadi accommodates various tasks, from running climate models to genome sequencing, from designing molecules to astrophysical modelling. 

This workshop provides an introduction to basic command-line operations and guidelines for working efficiently on Gadi, the high-performance computing (HPC) machine at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI).

Prerequisites

1. Access to a shell that supports SSH.

2. NCI account

Attendees are strongly encouraged to review the following pages, which contain essential background information, before the course.

• Welcome to Gadi

• Linux Command Quick Reference

• Queue Limits and Queue Structure

Objectives

The training is aiming to empower attendees to work with confidence on Gadi with a basic understanding of 

• resource accounting

• the difference among login, compute and data-mover nodes

• job submission and management

• module environment, for using software applications

• essential skills to plan, track and manage their jobs on Gadi.

Learning Outcomes

At the completion of this training, you will be able to 

• Login to Gadi

• Transfer data on and off Gadi

• Run module commands to customise user environment and configure software applications

• Submit jobs

• Check and maintain compute, storage, and job status

• Estimate job cost

• Request resources adequate for your jobs

• Monitor job status/progress and its resource utilisation 

• Understand common reasons why jobs finish with errors

• Ask questions about jobs like a pro

Topics Covered

• Introduction to HPC, NCI and Gadi

• Australian Research Environment (ARE)

• Commands on Gadi

  • File and Directory Management

  • Process Management

  • File Transfer

  • Text Viewing and Editing

• Requesting Resources

  • Batch jobs

  • Interactive Jobs

• Jupyter notebooks in ARE