Tutorial III of The “Scale-Up” HPC & AI Tutorial Series: Serial vs Parallel Workflows

This is the third of a five-part tutorial series called Scaled-Up. More information on the tutorial series can be found at https://scales.umbc.edu/training/. 

In this tutorial, you will go beyond basic commands and example scripts to understand the "brain" of the chip cluster—the Compute Nodes. Building on the reproducible environments established in previous sessions, we will demystify how your Slurm resource requests actually map to physical hardware. You will learn how to run more complex tasks in both Serial (single-CPU) and Parallel (Multi-CPU or Multi-Node) workflows, ensuring you know exactly how to utilize compute resources for more advanced research. 

For the lab session, we will explore the practical differences between serial and parallel execution by submitting jobs with varying resource configurations. You will practice interpreting output logs to visualize how tasks are distributed across the cluster and use advanced Slurm commands to monitor resource usage in real-time. By the end of this session, you will be able to distinguish between cores and nodes, optimize your job scripts for efficiency, and debug common errors related to parallel execution.

Similar to other tutorials of the series, the training will follow the "flipped-classroom" active learning style. Before coming to the lab, participants will complete a self‑paced Blackboard module that includes short hands‑on activities (called "DoIT Yourself Activities"). During the in‑person lab session, we will focus on questions, troubleshooting, and practicing examples so that you can further your understanding and strengthen the workflow.

These events are hybrid, but there is limited support for online participants. For those attending in-person: Be sure to bring your laptop!

Note that it's important to RSVP by Friday, 3/27/2026, so that we can provision accounts on the chip HPC and make Blackboard content available to you.

Remember that it's important that each participant review the available content before the event to make the best use of the synchronous classroom session (this event). We'll send a reminder to those who have RSVPed a day or so before the event!