Winter Research Computing Bootcamp

Winter Research Computing Bootcamp starts January 19! Popular Python and HPC workshops are back. All winter workshops will be held online and there is no cost to attend.

Are you unable to attend a workshop date but are interested in research computing resources? Check out our Research Computing page to see our list of services and to access video recordings from past bootcamps.

Research Computing Bootcamp Schedule

January 2024

February 2024

See something you like? Register below! Please only sign up for a bootcamp if you are confident you can attend.

Register now! Introduction to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and Bootcamp overview

Date: Friday, January 19
Time: 10–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve

The first 30 minutes of the workshop is a high-level overview of what is offered to researchers by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada ("the Alliance"), the workshops in the bootcamp series, and how the bootcamps set researchers up to use the Alliance. The second 30 minutes of the workshop is open time for questions. Not sure which Bootcamp sessions to take? Wondering how your particular research project fits into the Alliance? This is an open space to ask these and similar questions.

Register now! HPC: Shell Basics

Date: Monday, January 22
Time: 9 am–12:30 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson

This 3.5-hour workshop will introduce you to the basic interface for using a High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment: the Linux Shell, a command line environment. You will learn how to login to a remote HPC machine and perform common common tasks, including 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.

Register now! HPC: Essentials

Date: Tuesday, January 23
Time: 1 pm–4 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Kamil Marcinkowski

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 the Digital Research Alliance of 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.

Register now! HPC: Scripting Basics

Date: Wednesday, January 24
Time: 9 am–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson

In this 2 hour, direct follow-up to HPC: Shell we will spend additional time looking at writing scripts within the Linux Shell as part of automating tasks. You will learn more about writing and using scripts to get your work done, including how to write loops, and how to generalize your scripts by allowing them to take inputs directly from the command line. This workshop will not cover the mechanics of submitting work to the HPC Clusters via scripts but is instead an optional preparatory workshop for HPC: Essentials, which covers this. 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.

Register now! HPC: Parallelism

Date: Wednesday, January 24
Time: 1 pm–4 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Kamil Marcinkowski

Are you having a hard time understanding parallel computing and High Performance Computing (HPC)? Specifically, all the terms such as: thread, process, job, vector processor, core, CUDA, MPI, and many more. This session will provide you with a map to understand parallel computing, a description of the terms and concepts and how they relate to each other. Like any good map, it will let you know which concepts and terms you need to know in greater detail, and how they relate to what you are trying to do. With this map in hand you will be in a better position to decide when and how to take advantage of the parallel computing architectures that are available to you. This workshop will include a simple and practical live demonstration running and viewing different types of parallel programs/concepts on an HPC cluster.

Register now! HPC: Interactive Tuning & Debugging

Date: Thursday, January 25
Time: 1 pm–4 pm
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. High performance computing (HPC) clusters are composed of Linux machines, understanding and controlling work on a cluster is an extension of the skills in doing the same on a Linux machine. You will learn how to debug by telling how many resources: memory, open files, how much disk IO, Iops, and how much network traffic a program uses.

Register now! Tmux: turbo-charge your interactive work on the cluster

Date: Friday, January 26
Time: 9 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want

(This session will only be offered if there is sufficient enrolllment.) Have you experienced issues with unstable SSH connections that prevent you from being productive on your favorite cluster? Do you sometimes wish you had an extra terminal open so that you could run additional programs while waiting for tasks to complete? tmux is a terminal multiplexer (installed on the clusters), and it can provide solutions to both connectivity and productivity sore points. It keeps your work session alive (even under the worst network conditions) while also providing you with the power to turn your terminal into a tiled window interface. This session will walk through some of the best features that will help you get work done on the cluster.

Register now! Introduction to Python

Date:
Tuesday, January 23
Thursday, January 25
Tuesday, January 30
Thursday, February 01

Time: 9 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want

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:

https://ualberta-rcg.github.io/python-intro/setup/

Participants will need a computer that has a strong internet connection to handle video streaming.

Register now! OpenRefine

Date: Monday, February 5
Time: 9 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson

This session will introduce participants to OpenRefine, a powerful free and open source tool to work with large datasets. We will quickly work through how to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format tabular data and automatically track any changes. This session is suitable for beginners with no prior knowledge of OpenRefine.

Register now! Intermediate Python: Python on the Cluster

Date: 
Tuesday, February 6
Thursday, February 8
Time: 9 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want

This hands-on workshop (two sessions, both three hours) will give students an insight into running Python code on high performance computing clusters. Includes setting up jobs for batch submission, loading dependant Python packages, and interactive use on the cluster. Students should have some experience with the shell (e.g., HPC Shell Basics workshop), experience submitting jobs (e.g., HPC Essentials workshop), and at least one introductory Python course.

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