Unity References

We've collected some references to the basic utilities that might be helpful in using Unity, as well as more in-depth references to concepts that might guide your growth in using Unity and other HPC resources. Please let us know if you find other helpful references so that we can include them here for others to use.

Basic use

Linux

In contrast to Mac and Windows, many things are easier to do in Linux on the command line. Googling produces links to general references and tutorials or varying quality (over time you may find certain sites more reliable than others--for example, answers at Stack Overflow are generally of high quality because of extensive user review). Once at the Linux command line, you can search for help on a specific command using the man command. Here are some favorites.

• OSC's UNIX basics page. Most HPC facilities have a similar page; here are some other good ones from around the world:
  • University of Hull
  • The Arctic University of Norway
• YouTube videos (part 1 and part 2) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
• Software Carpentry's material on the UNIX shell (here, bash, our default shell).

Text editing

Unity offers three text editors, vim, emacs, and nano at the command line.

vim resources

• vim's site has links to documentation.
• Interactive vim training
• Third-party vim tutorial (part of a series of blog-style articles).

Slurm

SchedMD's official Slurm documentation, which includes man pages for user commands, as well as a Rosetta stone to facilitate translation between resource managers. 

How do I create a parallel environment?

HPC cluster: select the number of CPUs and threads in SLURM sbatch

Exit codes

They may be obtuse and cryptic, but exit codes, as reported in the email you get from a completed job, may help you diagnose a problem.

Handy tools

Make

• Software Carpentry's material on Make.
• The Wikipedia page on Make includes a sketch of its long history.
• Some projects use CMake.

git

• Software Carpentry's material on git in English and Spanish.

CUDA

NVIDIA's CUDA training.

Other computing resources

OSC

Unity's configuration closely resembles the Ohio Supercomputer Center's, facilitating interchange of programs and data. Much of OSC's introductory documentation is applicable to both environments, especially the HOWTOs.

ACCESS

Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), an advanced computing and data resource supported by the National Science Foundation.

OSG

Open Science Grid (OSG), a high-throughput computing consortium, also supported by the National Science Foundation.

Background

Ask.Cyberinfrastructure

Ask.Cyberinfrastructure is a developing question-and-answer format environment, similar to the Stack Overflow concept, for everyone involved with HPC, from researchers to system administrators.

HPC Carpentry

Software Carpentry has spawned HPC material.

Supercomputing in Plain English

The Oklahoma University Center for Education & Research regularly runs a series of webinars called Supercomputing in Plain English. Links to slide sets and YouTube videos of the most recent webinars are on that site.

Eijkhout

The Texas Advanced Computing Center publishes free HPC textbooks by Victor Eijkhout; other free textbooks on parallel programming and C++ and Fortran are on that site.

Sterling et al.

The most comprehensive printed reference is the textbook High Performance Computing--Modern Systems and Practices by Thomas Sterling, et al., Morgan Kaufmann 2018.