ACENET's Parallel Computing School seeks to educate participants in common tools and techniques used in high-performance computing and scientific computation. The format is two 2-hour sessions per week over six weeks (omitting the week of May 24). In the course of 12 sessions, we will cover general parallel computing, Dask, Machine Learning, OpenMP programming, GPU accelerator programming, and Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming.

This session teaches participants how to use the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s queuing environment on the national systems, using the job scheduler Slurm. Learn how the scheduler works, how it allocates jobs, what are reasonable requests to minimize wait time, how to make the best use of the resources to be more efficient, how to get more throughput, how to get more jobs running at the same time, and how to troubleshoot and deal with crashes.

Participants will learn how to use shell scripting to exercise the power of the command line. Shell scripting helps you save time, automate file management tasks, and better use Linux. This session teaches you how to name, locate, and set permissions for executable files, taking input and producing output. Learn about job scripts, shell variables, and looping commands. This workshop is designed for either new HPC users who are familiar with working in a Linux environment but have not had experience with shell scripting, or for experienced users seeking to get more out of shell scripting.

Linux is the terminal interface used to enable you to use the ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) HPC clusters from your desktop. It's the tool you need to get your data on the clusters, run your programs, and get your data back. In this session, learn how to get started with Linux, how to create and navigate directories for your data, load files, manage your storage, run programs on the computing clusters, and set file permissions. This workshop is designed for those with no prior experience in working with a terminal interface.

What is high performance computing (HPC) and what can it do for me? How can ACENET help? Used by researchers across many disciplines to tackle analyses too large or complex for a desktop, or to achieve improved efficiency over a desktop, this session takes participants through the preliminary stages of learning about high performance computing (HPC) and computing clusters, and how to get started with this type of computing. It then reviews software packages available for applications, data analysis, software development, and compiling code.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/acenet-basics-introduction-to-hpc-tickets-317566198047

This core session is designed to help new users at ACENET and Digital Research Alliance of Canada get up and running.

This is a beginner level series that is hands-on, covering the fundamentals of Python including data types, conditional statements, loops and functions, as well as program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems. The goal is to teach the practical knowledge needed to start programming, debugging, and using Python in everyday tasks. 

You do not need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

Using software-carpentry.org materials this workshop introduces you to the fundamentals of the Unix Shell, Version Control and R. This is a beginner level workshop series that is hands-on, covering the fundamentals of R, including data types, functions, importing, manipulating and analyzing data, and data visualization as well as program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

Most of us have experience using a computer, whether for school, work, or entertainment, but how many of us have actually had an expert teach us how to use it? This talk won't teach you how to troubleshoot everything, but it will give you insight to how media, programs, and data are encoded and used by computers, so you can make more sense of why computers behave the ways they do, and solve some of your problems with greater efficiency and less frustration.