This course prepares participants to effectively use the University of Houston high-performance computing (HPC) environments, including clusters such as Carya and Sabine. It introduces foundational HPC concepts and develops practical skills required to work in a shared computational research environment.

Participants will learn how to prepare, execute, and manage HPC workflows, as well as how to retrieve and interpret computational results. The course also provides an overview of HPC system architecture, user access procedures, and configuration of user environments. In addition, it covers the compilation and linking of scientific codes for both CPU and GPU-based computing systems.

A significant portion of the course is dedicated to job scheduling and workload management using the SLURM batch system. Participants will develop the ability to write batch job scripts, submit and monitor jobs, and run common scientific applications on HPC systems, including MATLAB, R, Python, and NAMD.

The Linux component of the course introduces essential command-line skills required for HPC usage. Topics include user account management, file permissions, directory navigation, command-line interface (CLI) usage, system utilities, and basic file and directory operations.

Finally, the course covers shell scripting for workflow automation. Participants will learn scripting fundamentals, including built-in shell commands, variables, parameters, control structures, functions, and file descriptors.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to independently navigate HPC environments, manage computational workloads, and develop reproducible scientific computing workflows on modern HPC systems.