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HPC Chapel lesson materials

Home Page: https://hpc-carpentry.github.io/hpc-chapel/

License: Other

Makefile 8.41% HTML 0.03% R 7.79% Python 82.40% Shell 0.63% Ruby 0.74%

lesson hpc-carpentry pre-alpha english chapel-language hpc-chapel hpc-carpentry-lab

hpc-chapel's Introduction

HPC Chapel

This lesson is focused on teaching the basics of high-performance computing (HPC). There are 4 primary components to this lesson. Each component is budgeted half a day's worth of teaching-time, resulting in a two day workshop.

UNIX fundamentals
Working on a cluster
Programming language introduction/review
Introduction to parallel programming

Sections 3 and 4 (programming) will feature two programming languages: Python and Chapel. There are strong arguments for both languages, and instructors will be able to choose which language they wish to teach in.

Topic breakdown and todo list

The lesson outline and rough breakdown of topics by lesson writer is in lesson-outline.md. The topics there will be initially generated by the lesson writer, and then reviewed by the rest of the group once complete.

Lesson writing instructions

This is a fast overview of the Software Carpentry lesson template. This won't cover lesson style or formatting (address that during review?).

For a full guide to the lesson template, see the Software Carpentry example lesson.

Lesson structure

Software Carpentry lessons are generally episodic, with one clear concept for each episode (example). We've got 4 major sections, each section should be broken up into several episodes (perhaps the higher-level bullet points from the lesson outline?).

An episode is just a markdown file that lives under the _episodes folder. Here is a link to a markdown cheatsheet with most markdown syntax. Additionally, the Software Carpentry lesson template uses several extra bits of formatting- see here for a full guide. The most significant change is the addition of a YAML header that adds metadata (key questions, lesson teaching times, etc.) and special syntax for code blocks, exercises, and the like.

Episode names should be prefixed with a number of their section plus the number of their episode within that section. This is important because the Software Carpentry lesson template will auto-post our lessons in the order that they would sort in. As long as your lesson sorts into the correct order, it will appear in the correct order on the website.

Publishing changes to GitHub + the GitHub pages website

The lesson website is viewable at hpc-carpentry.github.io/hpc-novice.

The lesson website itself is auto-generated from the gh-pages branch of this repository. GitHub pages will rebuild the website as soon as you push to the GitHub gh-pages branch. Because of this gh-pages is considered the "master" branch.

Previewing changes locally

Obviously having to push to GitHub every time you want to view your changes to the website isn't very convenient. To preview the lesson locally, run make serve. You can then view the website at localhost:4000 in your browser. Pages will be automatically regenerated every time you write to them.

Note that the autogenerated website lives under the _site directory (and doesn't get pushed to GitHub).

This process requires Ruby, Make, and Jekyll. You can find setup instructions here.

Example lessons

A couple links to example SWC workshop lessons for reference:

Example Bash lesson
Example Python lesson
Example R lesson (uses R markdown files instead of markdown)

hpc-chapel's People

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cgeroux rmdickson exeter-data-analytics tkphd cwant johnjsb gabeclass

hpc-chapel's Issues

Setup covers Python, but not Chapel or a Cluster

The first lesson, Intro, has as its objective "Write and execute our first chapel program." As written, this requires either a local installation of Chapel or access to a remote resource that has Chapel installed. Neither of these prereqs is covered in the Setup, or in the lesson itself.

Recommend pointing learners to Chapel Releases and the Quickstart Instructions.

Don't use `.o` at the end of executable file names

A lot of the examples create executables with a .o at the end of the file names, e.g.,

chpl --fast hello.chpl -o hello.o

Having an executable file with an extension .o defies the typical convention of .o files (an object file: compiled but unlinked code, which can't be executed on its own).

I would recommend (and am willing to do the work) to change the examples, for example replacing the above example with:

chpl --fast hello.chpl -o hello

Add discussion/instructor notes sections

We should add something for these sections (Why are we teaching Chapel?/Some considerations when installing Chapel/etc.)

discretization in first lesson

The last section of the first lesson is confusing -- written almost as an exercise, but it's probably a "teaser" for what the course might accomplish. In doing so, it introduces a bevy of new concepts, which is not great from a pedagogical standpoint.

Recommend removing the "Case Study" section (line 98 on) from 01-intro.md.

Update examples and add to Chapel tests

It would be good to update the examples to make sure they work with the latest Chapel release. One way to ensure that they keep working is to add the examples to Chapel's tests.

possible issue reported by email

We've received the following feedback by email, so I'm passing it along. I let the OP know so they can chime in or follow the conversation here. Thanks!

Hello,

I have been working through your tutorial and was having some issues on the "Domains and single-locale data parallelism" section. When I use the code for the Distributed Domains, it gives me errors regarding the line:

a = "%i".format(a.locale.id) + '-' + here.name + '-' + here.maxTaskPar + ' ';

I believe something may have changed with how strings work with formatting?

No rush or pressure about this. I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't aware. It is also possible something is wrong on my end.

Thank you,

Add syntax highlighting to examples

Chapel syntax highlighting should work in Jekyll using pygments, as described here.

We should be able to enable syntax highlighting with:

{% highlight chapel %}
// chapel code here
{% endhighlight %}

Move `--fast` to later lessons

The --fast compiler flag is introduced in the very first episode - it should be moved to a later lesson where performance is talked about.