Fall Research Computing Bootcamp

Fall Research Computing Bootcamp starts September 22! All fall 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

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

September 2023

October 2023

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

Date: Friday, Sep 22
Time: 10–11 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson, Dean Schieve et al

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! Research Computing Network

Date: Friday, Sep 22
Time: 11 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Dean Schieve

This workshop will introduce you to the Research Computing Network, a digital communities of interest platform for University of Alberta faculty, staff and student researchers. Learn how you can connect with campus researchers, discuss topics related to advanced research computing and share resources, tips and tricks.

Register now! HPC: Shell Basics

Date: Monday, Sep 25
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! Research Offices Marketplace 

Date: Monday, Sep 25
Time: 2–3 pm
Location: Online
Facilitator: Various research support professionals from across campus

Research computing on campus is supported by a number of different people and organizations making it the case that deploying new or suitably complicated projects can be difficult to coordinate. This on-line session is designed to provide quick information from the relevant research offices on campus and facilitate several quick conversations to discover the things that can help you get your research done. You’ll also meet library staff involved in supporting research data management and learn about what they offer and be able to quickly scaffold together a plan for deploying your research.

Register now! HPC: Essentials

Date: Tuesday, Sep 26
Time: 9 am–12 noon
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, Sep 27
Time: 9–11 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 prepartory 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: Thursday, Sep 28
Time: 9 am–12 noon
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! RAC Best Practices 

Date: Friday, Sep 29
Time: 10 am–11:30 am
Location: Online
Facilitator: John Simpson, Kamil Marcinkowski, & Carol Ladner-Keay

The Resource Allocation Competition (RAC) from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada is a way that many researchers across Canada gain access to computing and storage resources to assist with their research. This can range from a few dozen cores and some extra terrabytes of storage to thousands of cores and hundreds of terrabytes 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.

Register now! Cloud Intro

Date: Monday, Oct 2
Time: 9:30 am–12 noon
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 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 access those cloud resources, as a pre-requisite of the following two sessions: Cloud Hands-on and Cloud Advanced.

Register now! Intermediate Python: Python on the Cluster 

Date: Tuesday, Oct 3
Time: 9 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Chris Want

This hands-on workshop (3 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.

Register now! Cloud Hands-on

Date: Wednesday, Oct 4
Time: 9:30 am–12 noon
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 virtual machines, setting up the environment such as network, authentication, storage volumes, etc. You will also be shown how to conveniently access research computing software repositories/modules based on CVMFS, a potent&convenient research software distribution system in the world.

Attendees are strongly recommended to take the Cloud Intro session and to register to Digital Research Alliance of Canada before attending this session. While if you haven't your own account, don't worry. You will still be ok to join us with using our pre-set guest user accounts.

Register now! HPC: Interactive Tuning & Debugging

Date: Thursday, Oct 5
Time: 9 am–12 noon
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! Cloud Advanced/Containerization

Date: Friday, Oct 6
Time: 9:30 am–12 noon
Location: Online
Facilitator: Erming Pei

The Cloud Advanced session aims to accommodate different topics of advanced cloud technologies & applications. IN this session you will be introduced about containerization that is a hot topic in cloud computing area. The target of this talk is to present an overview of containerization and its 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. A few popular containerization tools, such as Docker, will be introduced subsquently, with a discussion of basic concepts and operations.

Two other containerization tools, Apptainer and Kubernetes, will also be briefly introduced for different research computing needs. If time permits, there will be a demonstration about the use case of each of the three tools.

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