Fall Research Computing Bootcamp
IST's popular HPC and Python workshops are back. Fall Research Computing Bootcamp starts September 17! All workshops will be held online (with the exception of the Research Offices Marketplace) and there is no cost to attend.
Interested in more research computing resources? Check out the Research Computing page to see our list of services and to access video recordings from past bootcamps.
Research Computing Bootcamp Schedule
September 2024
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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9
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10
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11
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12
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13
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16
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17
10–11:30 am
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18
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19
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20
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23
9 am–12:30 pm
2–3:30 pm
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24
9–11 am
1–4 pm
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25
9 am–12 pm
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26
9 am–12 pm
2–3 pm
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27
9 am–12 pm
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30
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October 2024
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
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1
9 am–12 pm
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2
9 am–12 pm
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3
9 am–12 pm
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4
9 am–12 pm
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7
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8
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9
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10
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11
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14
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15
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16
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17
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18
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21
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22
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23
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24
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25
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28
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29
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30
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31
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See something you like? Register below! Please only sign up for a bootcamp if you are confident you can attend.
Workshops
Research Offices Marketplace
Date: Tuesday September 17, 2024
Time: 10–11:30 am
Location: AFC/ALES Atrium (2-16)
Facilitator: Various research support professionals from across the university
Digital research is supported by a number of offices across the university which makes deploying new or suitably complicated projects difficult to coordinate. This in-person, drop-in session is designed to facilitate several quick conversations with the relevant offices to learn about what these units offer and to be able to plan for developing and deploying your digital research.
The IST Research Computing team will be there along with the IST Digital Infrastructure teams who are responsible for provisioning the computing and networking infrastructure across the university. You’ll also meet staff from relevant offices including:
- Library ( Research Data Management and Digital Scholarship Centre),
- Safeguarding Research Office,
- Research Ethics Office, and
- College of Health Sciences ( Data Analytics Research Core and WCHRI REDCap).
Introduction to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada + Bootcamp Overview
Date: Friday September 20, 2024
Time: 10–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
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.
HPC: Shell Basics
Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 9 am–12:30 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
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.
RAC Best Practices
Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 2–3:30 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Carol Ladner-Keay & Kamil Marcinkowski
The Resource Allocation Competition (RAC) from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada is a way to access computing and storage resources beyond what is available by non-competitive means. This can range from hundreds of cores or several GPUs and some extra terabytes of storage to thousands of cores and hundreds of terabytes of storage. This annual competition is open for applications each October. This session will quickly cover the most important things to consider when submitting an application to maximize success and then open the floor to questions.
HPC: Scripting Basics
Date: Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Time: 9–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
In this direct follow-up to HPC: Shell, 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.
OpenRefine
Date: Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Time: 1–4 pm
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.
HPC: Essentials
Date: Wednesday, September 25, 2024
Time: 9 am -12 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.
HPC: Parallelism
Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024
Time: 9 am–12 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.
Research Computing Network
Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024
Time: 2 pm–3 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
This workshop will introduce you to the Research Computing Network, a digital communities of interest platform where University of Alberta faculty, staff and student researchers can connect with peers, discuss topics related to advanced research computing and share resources, tips and tricks.
HPC: Interactive Tuning + Debugging
Date: Friday, September 27, 2024
Time: 9 am–12 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.
Introduction to Python
Date: Tuesday, October 1 - Friday, October 4
Time: 9 am–12 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want
This is a 12-hour introductory online workshop (three hours a day over four 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, consider following the instructions for your operating system.
Intermediate Python: Introduction to Machine Learning
Date: Tuesday, October 8 - Thursday, October 10
Time: 9 am–12 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want
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.