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Advanced Research Computing Training Program
FREE virtual training workshops offered by CCAST/NDSU. Pre-registration is required!
The CCAST Advanced Research Computing Training Program is offering a workshop series to introduce advanced research computing (high-performance computing/supercomputing, high-throughput computing, cloud computing, data storage and management, etc.) to faculty, staff, and students at NDSU and certain other colleges and universities in the states of North Dakota and Minnesota. This training series also aims to provide researchers with the basic knowledge and hands-on skills to make the best use of local and national high-performance computing (HPC) facilities and ultimately to advance their research capabilities.
The online training events, offered on Friday from 2:00–4:00 p.m. via Zoom video conference, will include lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on sessions where participants have opportunities to perform simple and not-so-simple tasks on CCAST’s HPC systems. There are no prerequisites, except a willingness to learn. Some familiarity with computer programming and Linux shell scripting would be helpful, but not required.
The schedule for Spring 2022 is as follows (revised on 3/11/2022):
Five (5) core training workshops
- February 4: Introduction to high-performance computing (HPC)
Basics of HPC, computer clusters, parallel computing, HPC resources at NDSU and elsewhere, access to CCAST's HPC systems
- February 25: Linux for HPC: Working with Linux-based HPC systems
Basics of UNIX/Linux, job scheduler, queue policies, running and monitoring jobs on HPC systems
- March 4: How to get your work done faster? Parallel computing
Parallel programming models, work distribution among CPU cores, parallel scaling performance, tips on running parallel jobs
- March 11: Linux for HPC: Text processing and shell scripting
Linux utilities for searching texts and manipulating text files, Bash shell scripting to automate tasks
- March 25: Accelerated computing with GPUs
Basics of graphics processing units (GPUs) and GPU programming, running scientific applications on GPU compute nodes
Three (3) special training workshops
- April 1: HPC for statistics using R
Methods for parallelizing statistical simulations in R to take advantage of multiple cores; examples will include power simulations for test statistics from the literature
- April 8: HPC for bioinformatics
Running popular bioinformatics tools using the batch scheduler; examples will include a basic workflow for mapping high-throughput sequencing reads; Singularity containers
- April 22: HPC for materials modeling and simulations
Running properly and efficiently complex materials modeling software packages (VASP, Gaussian, NAMD, LAMMPS, etc.) on HPC systems
The training is FREE; however, pre-registration is required. Please register by February 1, 2022, by filling out this online form [The registration is now closed. Contact CCAST if you have any questions]. Prospective participants can register for any workshop; however, registering and attending all the core training workshops is strongly recommended because the workshops are sequential.
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CCAST provides advanced research computing resources, training, and consulting to faculty, students, and staff at NDSU and beyond. The research we enable spans a broad range of disciplines, including science, engineering, agriculture, public health, business, finance, etc.