Introduction to High Performance Computing (HPC Carpentry): Glossary

High Performance Computing (HPC) typically involves connecting to very large computing systems elsewhere in the world.

These other systems can be used to do work that would either be impossible or much slower or smaller systems.

The standard method of interacting with such systems is via a command line interface called Bash.

To connect to a remote HPC system using SSH: ssh yourUsername@remote.computer.address

Your current directory is referred to as the working directory.

To change directories, use cd.

To view files, use ls.

You can view help for a command with man command or command --help.

Hit tab to autocomplete whatever you’re currently typing.

File extensions are entirely arbitrary.

The * wildcard is used as a placeholder to match any text that follows a pattern.

Redirect a commands output to a file with >.

Commands can be chained with |

A shell script is just a list of bash commands in a text file.

chmod +x script.sh will give it permission to execute.