Fall Into Research Computing Bootcamp
Fall research computing bootcamp starts September 28th! Our popular Python and HPC workshops are back, including new sessions on Social Media APIs, Cloud, and Compute Canada’s Resource Allocation Competition. All fall workshops will be held online.
Fall 2020 Research Computing Bootcamp Schedule
See something you like? Register below! These workshops often have waitlists for registration, so don't delay.
If you're unable to attend a workshop after registering, please let us know at istcomms@ualberta.ca so we can provide the spot to another registrant.
Cloud Intro
Date: Monday, September 28
Time: 10am - 11am
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
You must have already heard about "Cloud" or "Cloud computing" or have seen this term everywhere. However, what is the nature of it? What's the difference from traditional computing model? How to access and use a cloud in particular for research purpose?
This workshop contains three sessions, starting with the "Cloud Intro" session that will give you an overview of cloud computing evolution, public & private clouds, and the cloud infrastructure deployed by Compute Canada and the how to access it, and then followed by the "Cloud Hands-on" session that will walk you through the whole process of launching your own virtual machine in the cloud, with more nuts and bolts covered. The last, namely "Cloud Advanced", is a variable session that aims to accommodate different topics of advanced cloud technologies & applications, including Openstack Heat, Dokku, HPC on cloud, etc. In this bootcamp, we will demonstrate how to use Openstack Heat to rapidly deploy cloud services and applications (e.g. create a service stack for hosting a Nginx based web service).
Python (4 half-days)
Date: Tuesday, September 29; Thursday, October 1; Tuesday, October 6; and Thursday October 8
Time: 9am - 12pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
This is a 12 hour introductory online workshop (3 hours a day over 4 days) on using the Python programming language, with a particular focus on data analysis using the Pandas library and plotting. No previous programming experience assumed (this course starts with the absolute basics). Either Python/Jupyter must be installed on your own computer, or a cloud based Jupyter environment can be used. If you do not have a version of Python and are not sure where to start, then consider following the instructions for your operating system here. Participants will need a computer that has a strong internet connection to handle video streaming.
HPC: Shell
Date: Tuesday, September 29
Time: 1pm - 4pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
This 3-hour workshop will introduce you to the basic interface for using a High-Performance Computing environment: the Linux Shell, a command line environment. You will learn how to login to a remote HPC machine and perform common commands used in such an environment such as moving through directories, viewing files, and moving files on and off the system. This is a version of the face-to-face workshop that we run regularly that has been truncated slightly to account for some inefficiencies of the online environment. Participants will need a computer that has a strong internet connection to handle video streaming. They will also need software to access the HPC systems that will be used as part of the course. Instructions on installing such software will be shared with registrants a few days before the course.
Cloud Hands-on
Date: Wednesday, September 30
Time: 10am - 12pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
This is the second workshop in our Cloud series and will walk you through the whole process of launching your own virtual machine in the cloud, with more nuts and bolts covered. If you are interested in registering for the first workshop in this series, register for Cloud Intro.
HPC: Essentials
Date: Thursday, October 1
Time: 1pm - 4pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Kamil Marcinkowski
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
This is the second workshop in the series designed to move researchers from no previous experience using high performance computing (HPC) clusters towards a position of confidence and competence. This workshop focuses on the mechanics of submitting programs (aka “jobs”) to the clusters so that they can be scheduled and run. Led by Kamil Marcinkowski, scheduling team lead for Compute Canada, this workshop will contain extra emphasis on interacting with the scheduler to ensure that your work is getting done rather than sitting in the queue. This workshop provides that background in a friendly, jargon-minimized, hands-on environment.
Cloud Advanced
Date: Friday, October 2
Time: 10am - 12pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
This is the third workshop in our Cloud series and is a variable session that aims to accommodate different topics of advanced cloud technologies & applications, including Openstack Heat, Dokku, HPC on cloud, etc. In this bootcamp, we will demonstrate how to use Openstack Heat to rapidly deploy cloud services and applications (e.g. create a service stack for hosting a Nginx based web service).
Compute Canada’s Resource Allocation Competition (RAC) Simplified
Date: Monday, October 5
Time: 10:30am - 12pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson
Find out what you need to get started preparing your application and highlight the specific aspects to pay attention to for success with Compute Canada’s annual Resource Allocation Competition (RAC). Hosted by John Simpson, Chair of Compute Canada’s Science Leadership Council, this will be a no-nonsense overview of the RAC application cycle with particular attention paid to the review and allocation processes so that you can prepare the strongest application possible. The final 30 minutes will be reserved for questions and discussion between attendees and the various Compute Canada experts in the room.
Parallelism
Date: Tuesday, October 6
Time: 1pm - 4pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Kamil Marcinkowski
Are you having a hard time understanding parrallel computing and High Performance Computing (HPC)? Specially all the terms such as: thread, process, job, vector processor, core, CUDA, MPI and many more. This session will provide you with a map, a description of the terms and concepts and how they relate to each other. Crucially, like any good map, it will let you which concepts and terms you need to know in greater detail as they are related to what you are trying to do, and which concepts are less related.
Social Media APIs
Date: Wednesday, October 7
Time: 9am - 12pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
This workshop will introduce you to the basic techniques for collecting information from social media sites via the application programming interfaces (APIs) they provide and the libraries available to Python to simplify this interaction. We’ll spend most of our time looking at Twitter but the basics of collecting information from Facebook will also be introduced. If there is interest from the participants we will also talk generally about scraping information from web pages. Working examples will be shared throughout that you can take and use (almost) immediately. No prior programming experience needed or expected. A Twitter account will be helpful but is not needed. If you want to be able to apply the workshop content immediately then you should have both a Twitter account and a Twitter developer account (visit dev.twitter.com to create one). Again, neither is needed in advance to participate fully in the workshop. The last 30 minutes will be reserved for open questions that participants may have about APIs or scraping web pages in general.
Regular Expressions
Date: Wednesday, October 7
Time: 1pm - 4pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson
THIS WORKSHOP HAS REACHED CAPACITY.
AT CAPACITY - Register for the waitlist!
Ever wondered how a web form "knows" that you haven't properly entered a phone number, postal code, or email address? Need to quickly reformat a long list of names from FIRST LAST to LAST, FIRST (or vice versa)? Need to capture all the words in a document that have 'T' as the second letter? Regular Expressions are a powerful tool for searching and validating sequences of text. This introductory workshop will assume no previous experience and have you writing basic expressions quickly and slowly picking your way through reading and writing more complicated expressions by the end. Participants will need a computer that has a strong internet connection to handle video streaming. A web service will be used for working with regular expressions so no software needs to be installed.
HPC: Tuning and Debugging
Date: Thursday, October 8
Time: 1pm - 3pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Kamil Marcinkowski
Your research has gone beyond the capabilities of your laptop, and you're now getting started with the cluster. Now what? How do you figure out what resources your jobs need on the cluster? What do you do when things go wrong? This workshop will share secrets of interactive cluster usage so you can schedule work efficiently, learn how to fix problems when things go wrong, and use the system for interactive code development.
Participants will need a computer that has a strong internet connection to handle video streaming. They will also need software to access the HPC systems that will be used as part of the course. Instructions on installing such software will be shared with registrants a few days before the course.
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