Roadmap: Getting Started on Vista
Vista is the forerunner to Horizon, which will ultimately be one of the largest academic supercomputers in the world. It is a resource provided through The University of Texas at Austin's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), where it serves as a bridge to the NSF's Leadership Class Computing Facility (LCCF). Vista, like Horizon, 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 Vista'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 Vista’s system architecture
- Explain the steps to get a Vista allocation
- Configure the shell environment
- Explain how to store and move data
- Compile a C/C++ 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
Vista is intended as a bridge to a leadership-class system, 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 Vista, you must be on a project with Vista allocation or submit an allocation request.