Our student-driven HPC environment

A major role of academic environments is to provide learning experiences for students to critically analyze and develop methods, both at a high-level of mathematical rigour, and at a low-enough level of implementation in order to yield experimental results on real datasets. Often these two goals are in conflict with each other, in terms of both learning time and attention. At SLIM, we strive to strike a balance between the two by abstracting away many of the low-level aspects of distributed HPC under a framework that matches syntactically with the mathematics of our field, while exposing enough control parameters for tuning performance characteristics. This talk will touch on the history of our efforts at SLIM, and culminate in an overview of our current method of interacting with the in-house compute cluster.