November 17, 2025, Kathmandu University Information Technology Center organized a one day introductory training on High Performance Computing (HPC). The training served as a foundation for researchers, staff and faculties from different departments of Kathmandu University in exploring the architecture, application, scope, and current state of the art of High Performance Computing. The training focused on the theoretical background of High Performance Computing and also delivered a hands-on experience to the participants in creating their first job at the HPC infrastructure, executing and monitoring the programs.

Program Inauguration

The event started with a welcome remarks from the Chief Guest Prof. Dr. Manish Pokharel, Dean, School of Engineering, Kathmandu University. Professor Pokharel highlighted the scope and opportunities HPC can bring in the real world and in academic research.

Prof. Dr. Sudan Jha, Associate Director, Information Technology Center, formally inaugurated the event by welcoming participants of diverse academic backgrounds. Professor Jha shared the overview of ITC, its mission vision, key functioning units, Artificial Intelligence Excellence Unit (AIE), Crisis Informatics Research Unit (CIR), High Performance Computing Unit (HPC).

Participants

A total of 25 participants from various departments and research units like Department of Biotechnology, Department of Health Informatics, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Agriculture, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Department of Environment Science and Engineering, Department of Physics, Turbine Testing Lab actively engaged in the handson training.

Session Details

Mr. Anand Gachhadar, Asst. Professor, DoEEE, Member of ITC started the first session on Introduction to High Performance Computing. This session solely focused on HPC, its evolution, serial vs parallel computing, necessity of HPC, Analogy of HPC vs PC, its components and current state of HPC at Kathmandu University.

Mr. Sanjog Sigdel, Lecturer, DoCSE, Mr. Shrawan Thakur, and Mr. Santosh Shaha, Members of ITC led the second and third sessions. These technical session focused on basics of linux commands needed in accessing the HPC nodes, Accessing HPC infrastructure remotely via SSH Tools like: OpenSSH, Putty, VS Code, disk and memory storage view,, check service status with systemctl.

HPC Unit at Kathmandu University uses SLURM(Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) for job scheduling, executing and management. The third session focused on demonstration of creating a SLURM configuration file to execute the code, executing the SLURM job, monitor the progress queue to see the job progress and other available jobs using commands like scontrol, squeue, sinfo

Although an introductory training, the content was both informative and technical with an objective to provide a real time experience on how a high performance computing infrastructure works.

The session concluded by taking questions and feedback from the participants on the session delivery, complexity, and usefulness of the training.

Professor Jha concluded the training with a commitment to conduct more sessions on High Performance Computing where we will get the opportunity to learn the core technicalities of HPC architecture, computation and optimization of parallel algorithms, tools and libraries in HPC.