SUMMARY

• Announcing SciNet’s 2018-2019 Training and Education Schedule on Scientific Computing, High Performance Computing and Data Science.
• To acknowlegde the Niagara supercomputer in your publications, please cite our recent PEARC19 paper:

  M Ponce, R van Zon, S Northrup, D Gruner, J Chen, F Ertinaz, A Fedoseev, L Groer, F Mao, B C Mundim, M Nolta, J Pinto, M Saldarriaga, V Slavnic, E J Spence, Ch-H Yu, and W R Peltier. 2019. “Deploying a Top-100 Supercomputer for Large Parallel Workloads: the Niagara Supercomputer”. In “Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning) (PEARC ’19)”. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 34, 8 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3332186.3332195

• This summer, SciNet organized or co-organized three successful week-long training events: The Compute Ontario Summer School Central, The International HPC Summer School, and the Petascale Computing Institute.
• Easier procedure to enable access to Niagara.
• BGQ and P7 clusters have been decommisioned.

Details can be found below and are also available on the SciNet education website courses.scinet.utoronto.ca and the SciNet wiki docs.scinet.utoronto.ca.

SYSTEM CHANGES

• The procedure to enable access to Niagara is now easier: once you have your Compute Canada account, go to the CCDB opt-in page at https://ccdb.computecanada.ca/services/opt_in and click on the Niagara “Join” button. Your access will be enabled in a day or two. Before, you needed to fill out a form to request a SciNet account that you would then not need to use. Note that if you’re receiving this email, you likely already have access to Niagara, in which case no action is required, but this information may be helpful for new members of your research group.
• The SOSCIP BGQ has been decommissioned on June 30, 2019. The P7 cluster was decommisioned at the same time.

SCINET EVENTS DURING THE PAST SUMMER

• June 24 – 28, 2019: Ontario Summer School Central (Toronto, Canada)
  • Allows graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs, and researchers to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing on modern HPC platforms.
  • Three such schools are organized annually by SHARCNET, SciNet, and CAC, see https://www.sharcnet.ca/help/index.php/Summer_Schools
  • The HPC, Data Science, and Biomedical streams of the SciNet school drew a total of 225 unique participants.
  • 159 participants earned certificates for attending at least three days of the school.
  • See https://scinet.courses/438 for access to the slides and training materials of this event.
• July 7 – 12, 2019: International HPC Summer School (Kobe, Japan)
  • Aims to familiarize the best students in computational sciences with major state-of-the-art aspects of HPC for a variety of scientific disciplines, catalyze the formation of networks, provide advanced mentoring, facilitate international exchange and open up further career options.
  • This expenses-paid event is a collaboration between XSEDE, PRACE, RIKEN and SciNet.
  • Eleven Canadian graduate students were selected to participate.
  • SciNet also delivered three of the sessions.
  • A team of three Canadian students took on the school’s parallel programming challenge and won the award for fastest GPU+MPI implementation of a Laplace code!
  • See http://www.ihpcss.org for details regarding next year’s IHPCSS, to be held in Toronto.
• August 19-23, 2019: Petascale Computing Institute (Virtual, but also at SciNet)
  • Virtual training to enable computational and data-enabled discovery in all fields of study by teaching the participants to scale their computational codes to leadership-class computing systems.
  • A collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the Blue Waters project at NCSA, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, SciNet at the University of Toronto, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
  • Broadcast to hunderds of participants in 22 hosts in four countries, with local staff helping the participants.
  • SciNet delivered two of the sessions.
  • Visit https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/petascale-computing-2019 for recordings of this event.

EVENTS COMING UP

To sign up for the events below, go to https://scinet.courses. Most events are recorded and posted on that stite within a few work days. Some events are broadcast, but remote participation currently cannot count towards SciNet certificate credits.

The SciNet Teaching Room and Boardroom, where many of the events are held, are located in the SciNet office space on the eleventh floor of the MaRS West Tower, Suite 1140, 661 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1M1.

• INTRO TO COMPUTATIONAL BIOSTATISTICS WITH R (MSC1090)
  Mondays and Thursday, 1 pm – 2pm
  24 lectures from September 9 to December 5, 2019

  In this course data analysis techniques utilizing the R statistical language, will be discussed and introduced, as well as, the basics of programming and scientific computing. The goal of this course is to prepare graduate students to perform scientific data analysis. Successful students will learn how to use statistical inference tools to gain insight into large and small data sets, as well as be exposed to cutting-edge techniques and best practises to store, manage and analyze (large) data. Topics include: R programming, version control, automation, modular programming and scientific visualization.

  Students willing to take the course as part of their graduate program have to enroll through Acorn/ROSI. This course is part of the IMS graduate program and to be taught at the UofT St. George campus (i.e., not in the SciNet classroom). Contact us if you wish to audit the course without credit.

  For more information, see https://scinet.courses/475

• INTRO TO NIAGARA
  Wednesday September 11, 2019, 10:00 am – 11:30 am
  SciNet Boardroom

  This is a class of approximately 60-90 minutes to introduce SciNet and the Niagara supercomputer and teach you how to the system.

  Participation counts towards the HPC Certificate.

  For more information and sign-up, go to https://scinet.courses/484

  Further sessions of this Intro are planned for October 16, November 13, December 11, January 8, February 12, March 11, April 8, May 13 and June 10.

• INTRO TO THE LINUX COMMAND LINE
  Wednesday September 16, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Learn the basics of how to use the Linux shell in two hours. Very useful for new users of SciNet that have little or no experience with Linux.

  Participation counts towards the Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/494

  Further “Intro to the Linux Command Line” sessions will be held on November 27, January 15, March 18 and May 20.

• INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING
  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
  From October 1 – October 29, 2019
  SciNet Teaching Room

  New to programming? Learn the basics of programming using Python in eight one-hour sessions over the course of five weeks. Sessions will consist of a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises.

  Participation counts towards the Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/472

• GIT VERSION CONTROL
  Friday October 4, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Introductory workshop to get started in the usage of version control GIT. This workshop is held in collaboration with UofT-Libraries and UofT graduate students could gain GPS credits.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/467

• SHARED MEMORY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING WITH OPENMP
  Friday October 11, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Students will learn the basics of shared memory programming with OpenMP. In particular, we will discuss the OpenMP’s execution and memory model, performance, reductions and load balancing.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/521

• SCINET USER GROUP MEETING (SNUG)
  Wednesday October 16, 2019, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm
  SciNet Boardroom

  Pizza, user discussion, and a tech talk TDB

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/499

  Further SNUG meetings will be held on November 13, December 11, January 8, February 12, March 11, April 8, May 13 and June 10.

• ADVANCED LINUX COMMAND LINE
  Wednesday October 23, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Increase you Linux (bash) command line productivity. Requires some basic Linux command line experience.

  Participation counts towards the Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/508

  Another “Advanced Linux Command Line” will be held on April 15.

• DISTRIBUTED MEMORY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING WITH MPI
  Monday October 28, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Learn the basics of Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming in this three-hour workshop. Prerequisites: C/C++ or Fortran programming.

  Participation counts towards the HPC Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/517

• NUMERICAL COMPUTING WITH PYTHON
  Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
  November 5 to December 5, 2019 (8 lectures)
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Learn about numerical computing even with little programming experience. Covers numerical computing in Python, best practices and visualization. Experience with Python is required.

  Participation counts towards the Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/473

• GPU PROGRAMMING WITH CUDA
  Monday November 25, 2019, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  The goal of this three-hour workshop is for students, new to GPU programming but familiar with programming in C/C++, to leave being able to write simple kernels for their own problems, and understand the tools and techniques needed to improve the results.

  Participation counts towards the HPC Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/516

• SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING FOR PHYSICISTS (PHY1610)
  Winter 2020, starting January 7.
  SciNet Teaching Room

  This course is aimed at reducing your struggle in getting started with computational projects, and make you a more efficient computational scientist. Topics include well-established best practices for developing software as it applies to scientific computations, common numerical techniques and packages, and aspects of high performance computing. While we will introduce the C++ language, in one language or another, students should already have some programming experience. Despite the title, this course is suitable for many physical scientists (chemists, astronomers, …).

  This course is part of the physics graduate program. Students willing to take the course as part of their graduate program have to enroll through Acorn/ROSI.

  For more information, see https://scinet.courses/468

• QUANTITATIVE APPLICATIONS FOR DATA ANALYSIS (EES1137)
  Winter 2020, starting January 8.
  University of Toronto Scarborough Campus

  In this course data analysis techniques utilizing Python and R statistical language, will be discussed and introduced, as well as, the basics of programming and scientific computing. The goal of this course is to prepare graduate students to perform scientific data analysis. Successful students will learn how to use statistical inference tools to gain insight into large and small data sets, as well as be exposed to cutting-edge techniques and best practises to store, manage and analyze (large) data.

  Topics include: Python and R programming, version control, automation, modular programming and scientific visualization.

  Students willing to take the course as part of their graduate program have to enroll through Acorn/ROSI. This course is part of the EES graduate program and to be taught at the UTSc campus.

  For more information, see https://scinet.courses/513

• PARALLEL PERFORMANCE TUNING
  Monday January 13, 2020, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  A three-hour workshop on profiling, performance analysis, and tuning of applications.

  Participation counts towards the HPC Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/518

• ADVANCED DISTRIBUTED MEMORY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING WITH MPI
  Monday February 3, 2020, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  In this three-hour workshop, you will learn advanced MPI techniques such as MPI Datatypes, MPI-IO and one-sided communications.

  Participation counts towards the HPC Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/519

• LINUX SHELL SCRIPTING
  Monday February 19, 2020, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Learn how to write bash scripts, use environment variables, how to control process, and much more. Requires some basic Linux command line experience.

  Participation counts towards the Data Science Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/511

  Another “Shell Scripting” session will be held on June 17.

• INTRO TO NEURAL NETWORK PROGRAMMING
  Starting April 14, 2020, 7 weeks, Tuesdays and Thursdays
  10:00 am – 11:00 noon
  SciNet Teaching Room

  This seven-week class will introduce neural network programming concepts, theory and techniques. The class material will begin at an introductory level, intended for those with no experience with neural networks, eventually covering intermediate-to-advanced concepts. The programming language will be Python 3.7; experience with Python programming will be assumed. The Keras neural network framework will be used for neural network programming; no experience with Keras will be expected.

  Participation counts towards the Data Science Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/514

• RELATIONAL DATABASE BASICS
  Monday May 4, 2020, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
  SciNet Teaching Room

  Principles and uses of relational databases with practical examples using Python and sqlite.

  Participation counts towards the Data Science Certificate.

  For sign-up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/520