Roadmap: Getting Started on Horizon
Horizon is the flagship of the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility (LCCF), provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). It is intended to be the largest academic supercomputer that is available for open research in the United States. Horizon, like its precursor Vista, is targeted towards scientific computing projects that require highly capable resources for AI and other HPC applications. It accordingly features NVIDIA "superchips" that closely couple CPUs with GPUs.
This roadmap covers an overview of Horizon's architecture, user environment, file storage and data movement, compilation of application codes, GPU integration, and job submission and management.
Objectives
After you complete this roadmap, you should be able to:
- Summarize Horizon’s system architecture
- Explain the steps to get a Horizon allocation
- Configure the shell environment
- Explain how to store and move data
- Compile a C/C++ or Fortran code with appropriate compiler options
- If needed, integrate and compile code targeted for GPUs
- Identify the correct queue for a job
- Submit a job to the Slurm scheduler and monitor its progress
Prerequisites
Horizon is the centerpiece of the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility at TACC, so its prospective users are already likely to have a high degree of familiarity and experience with HPC and parallel computing. The pace of this roadmap is meant to be relatively brisk, for that reason.
With that being understood, there are no formal prerequisites for this Virtual Workshop roadmap. A working knowledge of Linux is recommended; if you need more preparation in Linux, try working through the Linux roadmap first.
Requirements
To gain access to Horizon, you must be on a project with Horizon allocation or submit an allocation request.