Overview

Instructor(s): Dr. Zhenhua He and Richard Lawrence

Time: Tuesday, September 9, 2025 10:00AM-12:30PM CT

Location: Online using Zoom

Prerequisite(s): Active ACCESS ID, basic Linux/Unix skills

This short course will provide an overview of the resources available on the ACES cluster to support AI workflows and applications. We will introduce a wide range of tools useful for management of software, data, and jobs. Later classes taught by HPRC will expand on individual topics.

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Course Materials

Presentation Slides

The presentation slides are available as downloadable PDF files.

• ACES: Software for AI on HPC (Fall 2025): PDF

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• ACES: Software for AI on HPC (Spring 2025): PDF

Learning Objectives and Agenda

In this course, participants will:

• Understand the role of HPC in AI Workflows
• Learn to set up and manage HPC environments for AI
• Understand software for resource management and AI Workload Distribution
• Learn ways to optimize AI performance on HPC clusters

This course focuses, among others, on the following topics:

• Introduction to HPC for AI
  • What is HPC, and why is it important for AI?
  • Overview of HPC resources
• Environment Setup on HPC Clusters
  • Modules System
  • Conda/Virtual Environment
  • Containers
• Software for Efficient Resource Management and Allocation
  • SLURM
  • Drona
  • AI Workload Distribution Software
  • Specialized software
  • Intel oneAPI for Intel GPUs
  • Graphcore poplar SDK
  • Hugging Face Hub
• Performance Optimization
  System Management Interface SMI
  • nvidia-smi
  • xpumcli
  • sysmon
  • NVIDIA Nsight
  • TensorBoard