A Hands-on Approach for Scalable Parallel Applications Development: From Testbed to Petascale

HPC systems are ubiquitous yet inaccessible to college/university students as most universities in India still lack the infrastructure, experience, and budget for setting up an HPC facility. Therefore, it is highly desirable for academia to use effective pedagogy to train students about HPC concepts and develop skills to write parallel applications. In this paper, we present the hands-on approach of learning cluster architecture and the development of applications that can interact with HPC systems in a Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) environment. The applications have been developed on a testbed cluster and successfully scaled on the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) Petascale cluster named ANTYA. These applications have been used as a tool for HPC outreach activities at IPR for training young college students about PDC along with a hands-on understanding of cluster architecture by building testbeds from scratch.