HPC Training Series - Course 22 "HPC Fundamentals, Slurm, Open OnDemand & XDMoD"

Monday 13 Jul 2026, 12:00 → 14:40 Europe/Athens

EuroCC@Greece announces the 22nd Course of HPC Training Series with the subject "HPC Fundamentals, Slurm, Open OnDemand & XDMoD".

Date: July 13th, 2026, at 12:00 EEST 

Location: Online via Zoom  

Presentation Language: Greek

Audience: This course is ideal for HPC Engineers and Academic Researchers.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of the seminar, participants will be able to:

• Explain the role of High Performance Computing in AI, science, and engineering workloads.
• Identify key HPC components, including nodes, CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage, and networking.
• Understand parallel computing concepts such as tasks, threads, cores, speedup, and scaling.
• Use basic Slurm concepts to request resources, submit jobs, and monitor workloads.
• Access HPC resources through Open OnDemand for interactive sessions, file management, and job submission.
• Recognize when to use CPUs, GPUs, OpenMP, MPI, or CUDA for different computational tasks.

Prerequisites: Basic programming knowledge (preferably in C, C++, or Fortran).

Instructors’ Short Bios:

• Alexandra Charalambidou is an HPC engineer at the Digital Governance Unit of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She supports users of the University's HPC infrastructure, and moreover designs and maintains HPC related services. She has several years of experience in creating user workflows, porting, profiling, benchmarking and optimising scientific applications on HPC resources.
• Anastasia Makri is an HPC team member at the Digital Governance Unit of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and senior student at the the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University, supporting users of the University's HPC infrastructure and contributing to the improvement of the overall user experience. Her work focuses on user support, troubleshooting, software deployment and maintenance, as well as scripting for the automation of administrative and operational workflows in HPC environments.
• Paschalis Korosoglou is an HPC engineer at the Digital Governance Unit of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has participated in major national and European projects, such as EGI, HP-SEE, PRACE and HellasHPC, mainly in user services provisioning and application support activities. In this respect he holds a solid background on scientific applications porting, profiling, optimisation and benchmarking activities and has developed under several occasions code optimisation improvements related to hybrid parallel implementations (MPI/OpenMP) and parallel I/O best practices.
• Vassilis Asteriou is an HPC and DevOps engineer at the Digital Governance Unit of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a PhD candidate in communications networks at the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University. He received the B.S. degree in Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2020. His professional experience includes HPC and Cloud infrastructure and services deployment and management, installation, distribution and troubleshooting of scientific software and HPC user support. He has participated in EuroCC 2.
• Dr. Nikos Bakas is a Senior Data Scientist at GRNET with a broad background in Artificial Intelligence. He has authored numerous publications across AI thematic areas including Machine Learning, Numerical Methods, Optimization, and Large Language Models. He has served as principal investigator, researcher, and coordinator in multiple projects at research centers and universities. Dr. Bakas holds a Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens and has long-standing teaching experience. He also brings extensive programming expertise in a wide range of languages and frameworks, and the training seminars he has organized have reached a broad community of engineers.

 

Note: Please enter your institutional/corporate email when registering.

 

 

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EuroCC 3 has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under Grant Agreement No. 101306701. The JU receives support from the European Union‘s Digital Europe Programme and Germany, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece,Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Türkiye, and Kosovo. 

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Neither the European Union nor the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking can be held responsible for them.

 

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12:00 → 12:10 Introduction to EuroCC 3 & the training events

Speaker: Nikolaos Bakas (GRNET)

12:10 → 12:50 Introduction to High Performance Computing

This talk introduces High Performance Computing (HPC) as a foundation for modern AI and scientific workloads. It explains how clusters combine CPUs, GPUs, nodes, memory, networking, storage, and job schedulers to run demanding computations efficiently. The session covers parallel computing concepts such as cores, threads, tasks, data and task parallelism, then moves into scaling, speedup, efficiency, strong and weak scaling, Amdahl’s Law, and Gustafson’s Law. It also presents key HPC programming models, including OpenMP, MPI, GPUs, and CUDA, before highlighting leading European supercomputers and EuroHPC access routes for researchers and industry. Practical examples help link theory to real workloads.

Speaker: Nikolaos Bakas (GRNET)

12:50 → 13:05 HPC at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

This opening session welcomes participants to the HPC training program and sets the stage for the sessions that follow. We outline the structure and goals of the program, introduce the topics covered across the individual talks and tutorials, and provide guidance on how to get the most out of the training. Participants get a brief overview of what High Performance Computing is, why it matters for modern research and industry, and what skills they will develop by the end of the program. We also introduce the Aristotle HPC cluster at AUTH serving more than 12 research departments and supporting over 100 scientific publications since 2018, as the primary platform on which the hands-on exercises will be carried out. The training overall requires no prior HPC experience and is suitable for all participants regardless of background.

Speaker: Paschalis Korosoglou (AUTH)

13:05 → 13:45 Practical Slurm: Batch Job Scheduling on HPC clusters

This talk introduces Slurm, a scheduling and workload management system for HPC clusters. It explains how Slurm allocates shared resources among multiple users, manages job queuing, and enables efficient parallel job execution. The session covers Slurm's multifactor priority scheduling and backfill algorithms that optimize resource utilization. Practical examples demonstrate job submission for various workloads including serial jobs, multi-core CPU tasks, MPI parallelization (using Gromacs), memory-intensive applications, GPU computing, and licensed software. Key Slurm commands for monitoring and managing jobs are presented, providing researchers with essential tools for accessing and optimizing HPC resources on the Aristotle cluster.

Speaker: Vasilis Asteriou (AUTH)

13:45 → 14:25 Open OnDemand: the HPC Web Portal

Open OnDemand is a web portal application that enables HPC access through any modern browser, eliminating the need for SSH clients or command-line interfaces. The presentation covers the platform's core capabilities: file management, interactive applications like Jupyter and RStudio directly on compute nodes, and a web-based shell. The feature demo showcases virtual desktops, VS Code, MATLAB, and customized user experiences for different user types. The Project Manager, a recent feature, enables researchers to create and organize research projects while building, submitting, and monitoring batch jobs through an intuitive interface.

Speakers: Alexandra Charalambidou (AUTH) , Anastasia Makri (AUTH)

14:25 → 14:40 XDMoD Usage Reports

XDMoD (XD Metrics on Demand) is an open-source web portal that provides comprehensive monitoring and analysis of High Performance Computing (HPC) resource usage.

Speaker: Alexandra Charalambidou (AUTH)