High-performance computing with Ubuntu

A lot of High Performance Computing centres now provide (a) an instance of Open OnDemand for beginning users and (b) additional training and documentation for the next step.

I myself work for UNSW Australia and am one of the team that maintains our small 7000-core HPC cluster; many of our researchers also use the Australian 260,760-core national facilities at NCI. Both UNSW and NCI run Open OnDemand. Both have extensive documentation on how to create scripts. And both have hands-on training sessions that take users from a position of "I know nothing about Linux and HPC" to "I can successfully write job scripts for my research". My own course is freely available at https://www.zap.org.au/~john/intro-to-linux-and-hpc.pdf