Spring Research Computing Bootcamp
IST's popular HPC and Cloud workshops are back. Spring Research Computing Bootcamp starts April 30! 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
April 2024
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2
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3
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5
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8
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9
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12
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15
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18
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19
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22
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23
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24
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25
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26
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29
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30
10–11:30 am
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May 2024
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
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1
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2
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3
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6
9 am–12:30 pm
1 pm–3 pm
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7
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8
9 am–12 pm
1 pm–3 pm
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9
9 am–12 pm
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10
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13
9:30 am–12 pm
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14
9 am–11 am
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15
9:30 am–12 pm
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16
10 am–11 am
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17
9:30 am–12 pm
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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27
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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.
Research Offices Marketplace
Date: Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Time: 10–11:30 am
Location: GSB 2-10 (Green Space on 2nd floor)
Facilitator: Various research support professionals from across the university
Research computing is supported by a number of different people and offices across the university, which makes deploying new or suitably complicated projects difficult to coordinate. This drop-in session is designed to provide quick information from the relevant research offices and facilitate several quick conversations to discover the things that can help you get your research done. You will meet staff from various offices including the Research Partner Network and the College of Health Sciences as well as library and REDCap staff involved in supporting research data management. You will learn about what these units offer and be able to quickly scaffold together a plan for developing and deploying your digital research.
Workshops
Introduction to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and Bootcamp overview
Date: Friday, May 3, 2024
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 for your 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.
HPC: Shell Basics
Date: Monday, May 6, 2024
Time: 9 am–12:30 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
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 log in to a remote HPC machine and perform common tasks, including moving through directories, viewing files and moving files on and off the system. 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.
HPC: Scripting Basics
Date: Monday, May 6, 2024
Time: 1–3 pm
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.
HPC: Essentials
Date: Wednesday, May 8, 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: Wednesday, May 8, 2024
Time: 1 pm–3 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.
HPC: Interactive Tuning & Debugging
Date: Thursday, May 9, 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.
Cloud Intro
Date: Monday, May 13, 2024
Time: 9:30 am–12 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
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 do you 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 and private clouds and the cloud deployed by the 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 file system and object storage. Finally, you will be guided on how to apply for/access those cloud resources as a prerequisite of the following two sessions: Cloud Hands-on and Cloud Advanced.
Regular Expressions
Date: Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Time: 9–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson
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.
Cloud Hands-On
Date: Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Time: 9:30 am–12 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
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 and 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 done so, you can still join us by using the pre-set guest user credentials.
Research Computing Network
Date: Thursday, May 16, 2024
Time: 10–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve
This one-hour 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.
Cloud Advanced/Containerization
Date: Friday, May 17, 2024
Time: 9:30 am–12 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei
The Cloud Advanced session aims to accommodate different topics of advanced cloud technologies and 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 subsequently, 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.
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