Research Computing Bootcamps

This workshop is a high-level overview of Digital Research Alliance of Canada resources available to researchers, the workshops in the bootcamp series and how the bootcamps set researchers up to use local and national resources. 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.

Registration

HPC: Shell Basics

This workshop will introduce you to the basic interface, or command line environment used on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems: the Linux Shell. You will learn how to log in to a remote HPC machine, use common commands to move through directories, view files, transfer files on and off the system and connect commands together to perform complex tasks.

Registration

HPC: Scripting Basics

In this direct follow-up to HPC: Shell Basics, you will be introduced to the fundamentals of Linux shell scripting. You will learn how to create and execute shell scripts, 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.

Registration

HPC: Essentials

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.

Registration

HPC: Parallelism

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.

Registration

HPC: Interactive Tuning + Debugging

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.

Registration

Intermediate Python: Introduction to Machine Learning

This hands-on workshop (three half-days) will introduce students to central concepts in machine learning and provide an introduction to tools for doing predictive data science with Python. It includes an introduction to supervised learning (classification and regression), unsupervised learning (clustering) and basic neural networks.

Students should know some Python and Pandas (e.g., via the Introduction to Python course), but no previous experience with machine learning is required.

If you do not have a version of Python installed on your computer and are not sure where to start, you can use a cloud-based Jupyter notebook platform (like Google Colab) or consider following the  instructions for your operating system.

Registration

Regular Expressions

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.

Registration

Building and Managing Reproducible Pipelines as a Non-Root User in HPC with Apptainer

This workshop introduces Apptainer, a powerful containerization tool designed for high-performance computing (HPC) environments. Participants will learn how to build, manage, and deploy pipelines efficiently as non-root users, leveraging the flexibility and security of containerized workflows in resource-constrained environments. Topics will include container creation, pipeline integration, and best practices for seamless execution in HPC systems. For The Alliance HPC users, this workshop will demonstrate how to build Conda environment within an Apptainer container.

Registration

Cloud Introduction

You may 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 the traditional computing model? How to access and use a cloud in particular for research purposes?

The Cloud Intro will clarify all of the above, starting with an overview of cloud computing including the evolution of HPC/ARC computer technologies, public & private clouds, and the cloud deployed by Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance), followed by an introduction to the national cloud sites, compute resources and different types of cloud storage such as volume, shared filesystem, and object storage. Finally, you will be guided on how to apply for/access those cloud resources as a pre-requisite of the following two sessions: Cloud Hands-on and Cloud Advanced.

Registration

Cloud Hands-on

In this session, you will be guided step by step on how to use the Alliance cloud system including launching your own instances or virtual machines, setting up the environment such as network, authentication, storage volumes, etc. You will also be shown how to conveniently access various research computing software repositories on the basis of CVMFS that is a potent & convenient research software distribution system used around the world.

Attendees are strongly recommended to take the Cloud Intro session and to register for an account with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada before attending this session. If you haven't, you can still join us with using the pre-set guest user credentials.

Registration

Cloud Advanced/Containerization

The Cloud Advanced session aims to accommodate different topics of advanced cloud technologies & applications. Containerization is a hot topic in cloud computing. The target of this talk is to present a broad overview of containerization and related technologies. It's intended to lead into future sessions that will go deeper into each specific containerization subject.

We will start by answering the question "what is a container?", followed by the benefits of using containers, and comparison between containers and virtual machines. Docker, as the most popular containerization tool will be introduced subsquently, with a discussion of concepts and basic operations, and how to interact with image repositories. Two other tools for implementing containerization in specific scenarios (Singularity and Kubernetes) will also be briefly introduced. Time permitting, we will demonstrate examples of using Singularity and Kubernetes.

Registration

Globus Introduction for data transfer and sharing

Got research data to store, move and share? Globus can help! Globus is a service for fast, secure and reliable data transfers. This 30 minute session will provide an overview of Globus' functionality and demo of how to transfer and share data using the Globus web interface with a few minutes left for questions. Using the easy-to-use Globus web interface, you can request transfers and the service manages the data transfer between resources for you. The service automatically tunes transfer settings, restarts interrupted transfers and checks file integrity. You can also use this service to share files or folders and set access permissions for individuals or groups. If time allows, we will also briefly introduce Globus Flows, which is a tool for automated data transfer. At the U of A we can leverage Globus though the Digital Research Alliance of Canada to transfer and share data between the national clusters and other sites with a Globus Connector installed.

Registration