Users of high performance computing (HPC) can greatly benefit from the ability to parallize computational tasks across 10s, 100s or 1000s of CPU cores, which an in turn can speed up simulations by orders of magnitude. Whether or not you are a software developer, learing some basic fundamentals of software development for HPC – software version control, message passing between parallel tasks within software (MPI), and profiling & scaling software – will facilitate more effective computing practices, and may come in handy if you need to make modifications to research code.

The first part of this series is an introduction to creating, managing, versioning and sharing software repositories on Github.