Tutorial

The Quickstart showed the mechanics of a single recorded command. This tutorial walks you towards a real experiment, built from beginning to end, around a real program: julia-fractal, a small C++ renderer for Julia-set fractals. We start with a plain command that tries to run it and turn it, step by step, into a Spack-backed, MPI-parallel, fully recorded experiment. Along the way you use setups, jobs, apps, and the query and provenance surfaces together on a single realistic workload.

The tutorial comes in two parts:

• Part I — The guided tour — the essential. It builds the experiment end to end, from a plain command to a Spack-backed, MPI-parallel, recorded workload running on a supercomputer, introducing exactly one new concept per step.

• Part II — Refining the experiment — a refinement pass over the same experiment. It follows the same setup→run order and, section by section, improves each piece with a Knit capability that makes it cleaner, safer, or more reproducible.

• Part I — The guided tour
  • The program
  • Step 1 — A command that calls the program
  • Step 2 — A setup that builds the program
  • Step 3 — Submit it as a job
  • Step 4 — MPI in the setup
  • Step 5 — Launch it in parallel with knit run
  • Step 6 — Query and aggregate the results
  • Step 7 — Ask your experiment in natural language
  • Step 8 — Inspect and manage what you have built
  • Step 9 — Move to a real HPC machine
  • The complete experiment (Part I)
• Part II — Refining the experiment
  • Step 1 — Resources: fetch the source instead of cloning it
  • Step 2 — Parameter sets: declare the shared parameters once
  • Step 3 — Enums: make colormap a validated type
  • Step 4 — File output: record the PNG as a checksummed intermediate
  • Step 5 — Results and artifacts: record the table as a result artifact
  • Step 6 — Prepare: build a batch of runs, release them on your terms
  • Step 7 — Remove: erase recorded entities and their dependents
  • Step 8 — Bundle: ship the finished experiment
  • Step 9 — Querying across machines
  • The complete experiment (Part II)