HPC Community Tutorials

[alansill]

Food for thought: https://www.youtube.com/@hpc.social

We could host tutorials produced by the community for various HPC software, hardware, or features. This channel could be their home. Anything people would be willing to provide to us with a suitable license could be included.

[vsoch]

Love that idea! I've definitely had videos that I've shared that I just throw on my personal account (talks, or my SC dance) and it would be fun to have a community place to put it.

[glennklockwood]

A lot of tutorials/talks I've given that were recorded belong to the conference or org that hosted me. Creating collections (playlists?) that aggregate tutorials from across the various already-existing online resources might be a lower barrier, and it avoids having to deal with copyright/redistribution rights/etc.

Relatedly, when I saw this subject, I was thinking it was more about written tutorials. I've made lots of those over the years, but maybe blog syndication already captures some of that.

[vsoch]

It should be - I stopped participating in the weekly meetings something in 2019 but I spoke with Julie earlier this year and they are still charging forward on it. I think if you wanted to help and had vision for the resource they would greatly appreciate it! You could probably (akin to how they make spaces for groups) get an HTCondor space. I forget what they are called - "locales" maybe?

[alansill]

I have a YouTube space reserved in case we want to host original or donated content, duly vetted. We're also discussing something as above along the lines of a community index of separately maintained content. Opinions welcome from my point of view.

[mtwest2718]

I will ping Julie and see what I can do.

Getting old men to give up their beloved email lists is a fools errand but I can at least document/summarize stuff in a friendly space.

[mtwest2718]

I have a giant pile of topics in my head that would be wonderful, particularly for new infrastructure people, that would make good workshop ideas. Cover at least a few aspects of a single topic in one day. Preferable with hands-on assisted exercises. Yes, this does hint at the dreaded standardization and so be it.

• The chaotic symphony of batch scheduler daemons
• How to live without shared file system
• Making sense of networking nightmare
• The pains and pleasures of virtualization
• Who funds your infrastructure and how to be their friend
• Build your first (multi-node) cluster from start to finish
• Cluster visualization, the birds-eye view of your resources and their usage

[vsoch]

What about carpentries? Could you offer to start working on a lesson over there and get the community involved here?

[hearnsj]

Wow. And here we are - almost first hit on HPC Reddit is a cry for help on xcat courses.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HPC/comments/z23z4z/xcat_education/

For me, my learning path for xct was to get stuck in on an installation and to use the guides from OpenHPC plus the online manuals. However I have enough experience to know how to find things out in manuals like that and the confidence to go ahead knowing that I won't make irreversible changes. The cub HPC admin will not have confidence like that.

(If using the term 'cub' is offensive I will happily retract that. But I do like it)

[vsoch]

Yes very funny that the first post is someone saying "help meee!" I hope all of the help guides aren't buried in actual install manuals though - there are some posts on there that have good links to resources, e.g.,

and historically I've seen a few that are "help me setup my first cluster" and the comments have useful advice (I think?)

[mtwest2718]

cub is kinda weird TBH
i call myself a newb, which itself has its own baggage
"new HPC admin" is perfectly adequate for most contexts I imagine.

[sramkrishna]

Don't forget to use something like asciinema to record tutorials if you're using a terminal on Linux. It basically like the old unix 'script' command, but it uses CSS to do the recording. You can then play it back and the best part is that it is like a video you can pause, rewind, pause, fast-forward but best of all you can cut-n-paste the commands and then put it on your screen and compare what shows up on the video and what you have.

https://asciinema.org/

[vsoch]

Haha I'm so old school on that service my entire screen name is just "vs" https://asciinema.org/~vs :P

[vsoch]

This is my fave: https://asciinema.org/a/258360

[mtwest2718]

When it comes to tutorials, I feel like the SysAdmin/DevOps community would greatly benefit from explicit on-boarding lessons. And TBC, I don't mean talks but actual lessons. Like you would get at a workshop walk-through focusing on a narrow set of skills.

[vsoch]

I don't think I could be of much help there, I try to stay away from HPC as much as I can, ironically enough 😆

[sramkrishna]

I did too - and I see their point. Have a large general programming community and then use flags or whatever.

…

On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 8:45 PM Vanessasaurus ***@***.***> wrote: Stackoverlfow is really strict about posts. If you want to start your own community, it's a really long (hard) process too - ask.ci tried for the cyberinfrastructure community (and failed). — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#48 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABFES6TAAOQIC6Z5E5DOW3WNKO6ZANCNFSM6AAAAAASN5DKOA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: <hpc-social/hpc-social.github.io/repo-discussions/48/comments/4406583@ github.com>

[sramkrishna]

We in the GNOME community completely got rid of mailing lists this year and we are now 100% on Discourse. You can set up a "mailing list" mode - but it makes it easy to moderate.

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On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 8:24 PM Vanessasaurus ***@***.***> wrote: It should be - I stopped participating in the weekly meetings something in 2019 but I spoke with Julie earlier this year and they are still charging forward on it. I think if you wanted to help and had vision for the resource they would greatly appreciate it! You could probably (akin to how they make spaces for groups) get an HTCondor space. I forget what they are called - "locales" maybe? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#48 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABFES4TZE3HJ42O2GQWHJDWOEYGBANCNFSM6AAAAAASN5DKOA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: <hpc-social/hpc-social.github.io/repo-discussions/48/comments/4454346@ github.com>

[sramkrishna]

Oh yeah, i agree - although in the community I am in - it was late 30s and 40 year olds. But it's terrible for us because there is so much spam to deal with.

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On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 8:29 PM WestByNoreaster ***@***.***> wrote: I will ping Julie and see what I can do. Getting old men to give up their beloved email lists is a fools errand but I can at least document/summarize stuff in a friendly space. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#48 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABFES4GNAUKKLCQXM2PLF3WOEYZFANCNFSM6AAAAAASN5DKOA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: <hpc-social/hpc-social.github.io/repo-discussions/48/comments/4454363@ github.com>

[vsoch]

I think all of us here are in that same age bucket 😆

[sramkrishna]

Oh no.. not I. I think I'm a decade past lol.

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On Mon, Dec 19, 2022, 9:20 PM Vanessasaurus ***@***.***> wrote: I think all of us here are in that same age bucket 😆 — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#48 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABFES2OAN4QBMP5ISYBRSLWOE63PANCNFSM6AAAAAASN5DKOA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: <hpc-social/hpc-social.github.io/repo-discussions/48/comments/4454581@ github.com>