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SciNet News August 2016

August 29, 2016 in for_researchers, for_users, newsletter

The SciNet offices have moved to a new home! We are now located in the MaRS West Tower on the eleventh floor (address: 661 University Ave., Suite 1140 Toronto, ON M5G 1M1). As in our old spot, users, students, and friends are still welcome to visit our new abode, however, because we are still getting settled in, it is recommended to schedule a meeting (by emailing support AT scinet.utoronto.ca).

You will also find the announcement of SciNet course offerings in the 2016-2017 academic year. Users that take a sufficient number of courses can earn one of the SciNet certificates. In addition, many of our courses can now be taken for credit towards PhD and MSc programs by graduate students from several departments across the University of Toronto, including Institute of Medical Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Chemistry, Astrophysics, and Physics.

As always, details on SciNet events are available on the wiki and the SciNet education website.

SUMMARY

  • SciNet offices have moved.
  • SciNet’s Courses that can also be taken for graduate credit at the University of Toronto:
    • Advanced Parallel Scientific Computing
    • Introduction to Data Analysis with R
    • Introduction to Scientific Computing with Python
    • Scientific Computing for Physicists
  • SciNet’s Training Events: Intro to SciNet, Intro to Linux Shell, Storage and I/O in Large Scale Scientific Projects, SciNet User Group Meetings.
  • HPSS: Now also accessible via Globus.
  • GPC: New versions of ParaView and VisIt, and beagle for GPUs available as modules.
  • GPC: New web portal with records of your completed GPC jobs available for testing at https://my.scinet.utoronto.ca.
  • BGQ: Upgraded toolchain and operating system.
  • P8: We now have two Power 8 boxes with GPUs available for testing.

SCINET OFFICE MOVE

The SciNet offices have moved to a new home! We are now located in brand new offices on the eleventh floor of the new MaRS West Tower at the corner of College Street and University Avenue. Our new address is

661 University Ave
Suite 1140
Toronto, ON M5G 1M1

As was the case when we were in our old spot, users, students, and friends are still welcome to visit, however, because we are still getting settled in, we recommend that you first schedule a meeting by emailing support AT scinet.utoronto.ca.

Many of our courses, training sessions and user group meetings will be given in the new location, either in our new conference room or in our new classroom.

EVENTS COMING UP

Unless stated otherwise, all events take place at the SciNet Headquarters, now located on the eleventh floor of 661 University Ave., MaRS West Tower, suite 1140 (look for the bright orange reception area).

Most events will be recorded and some are broadcasted, but only some of the courses can be taken remotely for SciNet certificate credits, as indicated below. All events at SciNet are free but we ask that you enroll on the education website: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education .

Courses that can be taken for credit at the UoT

  • ADVANCED PARALLEL COMPUTING
    8 Lectures, Tuesdays and Thursdays starting Sept 20, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

    Explore advanced use case examples of parallel computing in scientific research.

    The course can be taken as a mini/modular graduate course by Physics, Astronomy, and Chemistry students.

    This course counts toward the High Performance Computing Certificate.

    For sign up and more information, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/263/index.php

  • INTRODUCTION TO DATA ANALYSIS WITH R
    12 Lectures, Tuesdays and Thursdays starting Oct 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

    The goal of this course is to prepare 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 practices to store, manage and analyze (large) data.

    For students in the Institute of Medical Science, this course can be taken as “Seminars in Translational Research” (MSC1010Y-1011Y)

    Graduate students from the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at UofT can take this course for graduate credit as well. Interested students from the EEB department should contact Prof. Helen Rodd in advance.

    Physics, Astrophysics and Chemistry students can take this course as part of the mini/modular graduate courses.

    This course also counts toward the SciNet’s Data Science Certificate.

    Location: St.George Campus, specific room TBD.

    For sign up and more information, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/262/index.php

  • SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WITH PYTHON
    8 Lectures, Tuesdays and Thursdays starting Nov 15, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

    Learn about research computing even with little programming experience. Covers basics of programming in Python, best practices and visualization. The course will last 4 weeks with 2 lectures per week.

    The course can be taken as a mini/modular graduate course by Physics, Astronomy and Chemistry students. This course can also be taken by students for graduate credits from the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at the UofT. Interested students from the EEB department should contact Prof. Helen Rodd in advance.

    This course counts toward the Scientific Computing Certificate and (partially) toward the High Performance Computing Certificate.

    Although in-person attendance is highly preferred, SciNet users can take this course remotely by following the lectures online and submitting the assignments.

    For sign up and more information, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/264/index.php

  • SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING FOR PHYSICISTS
    Physics graduate course (PHY1610)

    Winter 2017

    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 can be taken for credit by Physics graduate students, and by other graduate students that are allowed to take physics courses, however, they are strongly encourage to check this with their graduate coordinators first.

    Part of this course may be given as mini-courses as well. Details on this will follow later.

    This course counts toward the Scientific Computing Certificate and the High Performance Computing Certificate.

    Although in-person attendance is highly preferred, SciNet users can take this course remotely by following the lectures online and submitting the assignments.

SciNet Training Events

  • INTRO TO SCINET
    Wed 14th Sept 10:00 am – 11:30 am

    The “Intro to SciNet” is a class of approximately 60-90 minutes where you will learn how to use the systems. Experienced users may still pick up some valuable pointers during these sessions.

    Participation counts towards the SciNet HPC Certificate.

    If you are interested to participate remotely using Google Hangout, please send an email with your gmail address to which we can send the invitation.

    Location: SciNet conference room (MaRS West Tower, 11th floor)

    For sign up and more information, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/267/index.php

    Future “Intro to SciNet” dates and enrollment links:
    Oct 12, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/269/index.php
    Nov 9, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/268/index.php
    Dec 14, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/270/index.php
    Jan 11, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/296/index.php
    Mar 8, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/297/index.php
    May 10, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/302/index.php

  • SCINET USER GROUP MEETING
    Wed 14th Sept 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

    The SciNet Users Group (SNUG) meetings are every month on the second Wednesday, and involve pizza, user discussion, feedback, and a half-hour talk on topics or technologies of interest to the SciNet community.

    Location: SciNet conference room (MaRS West Tower, 11th floor)

    For sign up, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/291/index.php

    Future “SNUG” dates and enrollment links:
    Oct 12, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/292/index.php
    Nov 9, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/293/index.php
    Dec 14, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/294/index.php
    Jan 11, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/295/index.php
    Feb 8, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/298/index.php
    Mar 8, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/299/index.php
    Apr 12, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/300/index.php
    May 10, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/301/index.php

  • STORAGE AND I/O IN LARGE SCALE SCIENTIFIC PROJECTS
    Wed 21th Sept 09:30 am – 5:00 pm

    Location: SciNet classroom (MaRS West Tower, 11th floor)

    Learn how to pinpoint and alleviate bottlenecks in large data-driven research projects. Techniques such as tar, compression, ramdisk, file format options, and job scheduling techniques will be covered.

    For sign up, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/265/index.php

  • INTRODUCTION TO THE LINUX SHELL
    Wed 19th Oct 10:00 am – 1:00 pm

    The Linux shell (command line, or however you want to phrase it) is the most basic Linux interface that there is. If you don’t know what the Linux shell is then you need to take this course!

    In this course, you will learn the basics of how to use the Unix shell in three hours. Includes a mild introduction to bash scripting as well. This course counts toward the Scientific Computing Certificate.

    Location: SciNet classroom (MaRS West Tower, 11th floor)

    For sign up and more information, see https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/education/go.php/266/index.php

SYSTEM CHANGES

Note that most software changes for the GPC also hold for Sandy and Gravity.

  • HPSS: If you have an HPSS account, this is now also accessible from the Globus file transfer web-interface. Globus is accessible through https://globus.computecanada.ca, where you’d login with your Compute Canada account, while the name of the HPSS endpoint is “Compute Canada HPSS”, for which you separately authenticate with your SciNet account. For more information on using Globus, see https://docs.computecanada.ca/wiki/Globus .
  • GPC: New web portal with records of your completed GPC jobs available for testing at https://my.scinet.utoronto.ca.
  • GPC: Beagle GPU-version available for testing under the use.experimental module.
  • GPC: Python distribution Anaconda v4.x installed as a module
  • GPC: VisIt version 2.10.2 installed as a module
  • GPC: ParaView version 5.1.0 installed as a module
  • GPC: Versions 15.0.6 and 16.0.3 of the Intel Compilers are installed as modules.
  • GPC: Version 6.0 of Allinea Forge (containing the DDT parallel debugger, the profiler MAP and Performance Reports) installed as a module.
  • GPC: Gromacs v. 5.1.1 installed as modules (GPU and non-GPU).
  • GPC: Chemistry package Cantera installed as a module.
  • BGQ: Upgraded compute nodes and toolchain to V1R2M4 from V1R2M2. Note that this means that when recompiling applications, one has to start from scratch (i.e., no old object files).
  • BGQ: Front end nodes operating system was updated to RedHat 6.7. This should not change much for users.
  • P8: A new P8 system with two Power-8 machines, each with two NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs, is available for testing. For details, see wiki.scinet.utoronto.ca/wiki/index.php/P8

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN THE SUMMER OF 2016?

  • April: Participation of SciNet in Science Rendezvous 2016.
  • May: Visualization tutorial at 2016 “Chemical BioPhysics Symposium” and Best Practices at GLBIO 2016.
  • June: Participation of SciNet’s personnel at Canheit-HPCS 2016 (Edmonton, Alberta), and ISC (Frankfurt, Germany).
  • June: Participation of SciNet’s personnel at the International HPC Summer School (Ljubljana, Slovenia)
  • June: Intro to SciNet
  • June: SciNet User Group Meeting
  • June 21-26: International Summer School on HPC Challenges
  • May/August: Participation of SciNet’s personnel at the other instance of Ontario HPC Summer School 2016 (Hamilton and Ottawa)
  • July 11-15: Ontario HPC Summer School 2016 – Central
  • August 14-19: As part of the “2016 Industrial Problem Solving Workshop” to be hosted at the Fields Institute, SciNet will provide an introduction to High Performance Computing resources, as well as support for participants who decide to tackle this problems numerical utilizing supercomputer resources.

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Gravitation waves detected, again!

June 15, 2016 in blog, blog-general, blog-technical, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story, Testimonials

We congratulate the LIGO and Virgo collaborations to the second-ever observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes.

SciNet is proud to have contributed to the computation of the waveform templates that were used in this latest discovery of LIGO. LIGO measured about 55 gravitational wave cycles for this new binary black hole system. This large number of cycles made detailed computations of the expected wave-shapes more important than for the first detected black hole merger that was announced in February.

Canada is a leader of numerical calculations of colliding black holes, research led by Professor Harald Pfeiffer, Canada Research Chair for Numerical Relativity and Gravitational Wave Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Pfeiffer states: I am very grateful for the sustained support of the SciNet team during the last 7 years; their support and the access to computing time on SciNet’s supercomputers have been crucial for my research program and its profound contributions to the LIGO discovery.

frame06508

Above: The in-spiral and collision of two black holes similar to GW151226. The top portion of the frame shows the horizons of the two holes, in this case, at the moment close to the merger of the black holes. The middle portion of the frame shows the gravitational waveform projected onto the LIGO Livingston detector. The bottom part shows the frequency of the gravitational waves, gradually increasing from about 35Hz to above 700Hz. For this system, LIGO could observe many more gravitational wave cycles than for the first discoved system (named GW150914).

Visualization done by University of Toronto Undergraduate student Aliya Babul & Prof. Harald Pfeiffer, within the SXS Collaboration/www.black-holes.org.

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2016 Ontario HPC Summer School – Toronto

June 2, 2016 in blog, blog-general, for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news

ohpcss

The 2016 Ontario Summer School on High Performance Computing is a week-long academic workshop that provides attendees with opportunities to learn and share knowledge and experiences in high performance computing, technical computing, and data science. The Ontario HPC Summer School is given in three locations, in different weeks. The first one was from May 30 to June 3 in Hamilton, the second will be in Toronto from July 11 to 15, hosted by SciNet, while a third will take place in Ottawa from August 8 to 12.

The format of the school is that of a five-day workshop with mixed lectures and hands-on sessions on a number of selected topics, including shared memory programming, distributed memory programming and general purpose graphics processing unit programming, and data science. The program varies slightly per location.

Most sessions are given in parallel. When registering for the Toronto event, you can pick the sessions you are interested in from the following schedule (note that you cannot register for only part of a session):

SCHEDULE

Monday July 11, 2016
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
single stream: Intro to high performance computing and SciNet
1:30pm – 4:30 pm
stream 1: Shared memory programming with OpenMP, part 1 of 2
stream 2: Intro to the Linux Shell

Tuesday July 12, 2016
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
stream 1: Shared memory programming with OpenMP, part 2 of 2
stream 2: R for data science
1:30pm – 4:30 pm
stream 1: Programming Clusters with MPI, part 1 of 3
stream 2: Parallel R for data science

Wednesday July 13, 2016
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
stream 1: Programming Clusters with MPI, part 2 of 3
stream 2: Python for scientific computing
1:30pm – 4:30 pm
stream 1: Programming Clusters with MPI, part 3 of 3
stream 2: Python for high performance computing

Thursday July 14, 2016
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
stream 1: Programming GPUs with CUDA, part 1 of 4
stream 2: Visualization, part 1 of 2
1:30pm – 4:30 pm
stream 1: Programming GPUs with CUDA, part 2 of 4
stream 2: Visualization, part 2 of 2

Friday July 15, 2016
9:30 am – 12:30 pm
stream 1: Programming GPUs with CUDA, part 3 of 4
stream 2: Debugging
1:30pm – 4:30 pm
stream 1: Programming GPUs with CUDA, part 4 of 4
stream 2: Bring your own code

LOCATION

This event will be held in the Mechanical Engineering Building at the University of Toronto

Wallberg Building
Rooms 116 and 119
University of Toronto
St. George Campus
184-200 College Street
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3E5
Canada.

The nearest subway station is “Queen’s Park”.
Paid parking is available on the St. George Campus.

LODGING

Lodging is not provided by the organization. If you require lodging, you will have to make arrangements yourself. It may be worthwhile checking out the University’s summer residence program at www.studentlife.utoronto.ca/hs/summer .

MEALS

Meals are not provided by the organization, but refreshments will be provided during the morning and afternoon breaks.

COMPUTING FACILITIES

For the hands-on sessions, participants are to bring their own laptop with working wireless and with an ssh client with X-windows installed. The latter is needed to connect to one of SciNet’s supercomputers, to which the participant will get access for the duration of the School.

CERTIFICATES

Participants that complete at least three days worth of instruction are to receive an Ontario Summer School Certificate on the last day of the School. Note that this certificate is separate from the SciNet certificates, but parts of the school may count towards a SciNet certificate as well.

MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION

For more information on the sessions and for registration, please go to
www.sharcnet.ca/events/ss2016

The registration is free and is aimed at Compute Canada users as well as students, post-docs and other researchers from academic institutions. You do not need to have a SciNet account. Please be advised that seats are limited and tend to fill up.

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Science Rendezvous 2016

April 28, 2016 in for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, in_the_news, news, success_story

Join us Saturday, May 7th for Science Rendezvous! It is an annual festival at the University of Toronto that takes science out of the lab and onto the street.

At the SciNet booth, explorers of all ages will find out how researchers use computers for discovery. They will see how simple computer simulations that you can run in your web browser or laptop can reveal important facts about how complex systems behave.

Click here for more details about Science Rendezvous and its many exhibitors.

SR 2016 at UofT (St. George Campus) 2

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Gravitational Waves detected!!!

February 12, 2016 in blog, for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story, Uncategorized

On February 11th, 2016 (10:30AM EST), scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration together with representatives of the National Science Foundation, announced in a live press conference, the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
The event detected, named GW150914, was produced by two colliding black holes, inspariling and merging together. This signal was detected by LIGO on September 14th, 2015.

Details of this discovery can be found in the following papers:

Many of the researchers running simulations and analysing data in several of our clusters are directly involved in the efforts for accurately modelling, simulating and detecting gravitational wave signals.
As a matter of fact, one of the simulations used for visualizing one of the movies screened during the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, was performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).

“The first detection of gravitational waves passing through Earth is a tremendous discovery. These waves were generated by never before observed astronomical objects, colliding black holes. I am very grateful for SciNet and Compute Canada to provide the computing resources needed to explore the properties of binary black holes, research that was instrumental in building the waveform-templates that LIGO used in its momentous discovery.”
— Prof. Harald Pfeiffer (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto)

plane0060plane0320 plane0490 plane0590 plane0830
Simulation of a binary black-hole system emitting gravitational radiation (gravitational waves) performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).
These simulations were performed by solving Einstein’s equations of General Relativity using a code co-developed on SciNet, by the SXS/CITA collaboration.
Credit: SXS/CITA/SciNet
Another of the videos displayed on the press-conf, was also produced by solving Einstein equations using this same computer code co-developed on SciNet by the SXS/CITA collaboration.

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International HPC Summerschool 2016 in Slovenia

December 16, 2015 in blog, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

Ljubljana_panorama

Apply by 15 February 2016, decisions on March 9, 2016
Expenses-paid program
Sponsored by PRACE, XSEDE, Riken, and Compute Canada
website: http://ihpcss2016.hpc.fs.uni-lj.si/

The seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences will be held from June 26-July 1, 2016, Ljubljana, Slovenia. This is an advanced summer school on High Performance Computing which targets graduate students and postdocs who already have some experience in HPC parallel programming (for instance, MPI, OpenMP, or CUDA/OpenCL), preferably on software used in successful research projects.

The organizers of this summer school are XSEDE, PRACE, Compute Canada, and RIKEN.

Leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics. The program is still being finalized, but previous summer schools included the following:

  • Access to EU, Canadian, Japanese and U.S. HPC-infrastructures
  • HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics)
  • HPC Programming Proficiencies
  • Performance analysis & profiling
  • Algorithmic approaches & numerical libraries
  • Data-intensive computing
  • Scientific visualization

Participation in the summer school is decided through an application process. Meals, housing, and travel will be covered for the selected participants. Applications from students in all science and engineering fields are welcome. Although the school targets graduate students and postdocs, applications from research assistants and faculty are also welcome. Preference will be given to applicants with parallel programming experience, and a research plan that will benefit from the utilization of high performance computing systems.

Applications are due by February 15, 2016.
For further information and to apply online, please click here.

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International HPC Summer School in Toronto

June 29, 2015 in blog, blog-general, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story

toronto

Eighty students from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan, plus about twenty speakers and over thirty mentors gathered at the University of Toronto from June 21 to June 26, 2015, to learn about High Performance Computing, and share experiences in this multi-disciplinary field (see https://ihpcss2015.computecanada.ca). Sponsored by PRACE, XSEDE, Riken, and Compute Canada , this was the sixth such advanced international summer school on High Performance Computing, which targets graduate students and postdocs who already have some experience in HPC parallel programming (for instance, MPI, OpenMP, or CUDA/OpenCL), preferably on software used in successful research projects.

Leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists offered instruction on a variety of topics, including HPC programming proficiencies, performance analysis, and visualization, as well as presentations of how HPC gets applied in fields such as geophysics, climate science, material science, cosmology, plasma phyiscs, and life sciences.

SciNet, a partner in the Compute Canada endeavour, was encited to be the local organization of this large international event.
It was an engaging week of instruction and networking that we hope has given the participants the skills and inspiration to use HPC resources to explore scientific projects at new and unprecedented scales.

IHPCSS-Toronto-2015

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2015 Ontario HPC Summer School Registration Opened

May 29, 2015 in blog, for_educators, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news

ohpcss

The Ontario Summerschool on High Performance Computing provides attendees with opportunities to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance, technical, and data-centric computing. The Ontario Summerschool on High Performance Computing will have three installments. The first will be in London (May 25-29), the second in Toronto (July 9-13), hosted by SciNet, while the third will be held in Kingston (July 27-31).

The format of the Toronto installment will be a five-day workshop with mixed lectures and hands-on sessions on a number of selected subjects, including shared memory programming, distributed memory programming, and general purpose graphics processing unit programming. To incorporate this many topic, the summer school has two parallel streams throughout, from which you can pick and choose.

SESSIONS

  • Linux command line: a primer
  • Introduction to High Performance Computing
  • Shared memory programming with OpenMP
  • Distributed memory programming with MPI
  • General Purpose GPU Programming with CUDA
  • Data Analysis with R
  • Parallel R
  • Scientific Computing with Python
  • Python for High Performance Computing
  • HPC optimization and debugging
  • Visualization

LOCATION

This event will be held in the Galbraith building, University of Toronto, 35 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A4.

CERTIFICATE

Participants that complete more than three days worth of instruction will be given an Ontario Summerschool Certificate. Note that this certificate is separate from the SciNet certificates.

MORE INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION

For more information and (free) registration, please go to the website for all three installments:

https://www.sharcnet.ca/events/ss2015/

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Announcing SciNet’s Data Science Certificate Program

May 29, 2015 in for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

dsc

SciNet is pleased to announce the addition of a new certificate program, focused on Data Science.

As many of you know, SciNet not only provides compute cycles and storage, but also offers a wide range of education and training sessions. Users can already get a SciNet certificate in Scientific Computing or High Performance Computing when they have taken enough courses on those topics.

To reflect the growing trend in data-driven science, SciNet is now adding a new Certificate program, focused on Data Science.

To earn the SciNet Certificate in Data Science, users or students need to take at least 36 credit-hours of data science related SciNet courses such as “Hadoop workshop”, “Scalable data analysis with R / Python”, “Database Basics”, “Visualization”, and “Machine Learning”. Future courses on e.g. NoSql, statistics, and i/o and workflow, are being planned for the next academic year. Some parts of the upcoming Ontario Summer School Central to be held in Toronto in July at the University of Toronto, will count toward this certificate as well. See herefor details and registration regarding the summer school.

For other SciNet courses, you can register for on our education site, which will keep track of your progress in this new certificate, as well as for the other two certificates.

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Science Rendezvous 2015

May 18, 2015 in blog, blog-general, for_press, for_users, news, Uncategorized

20150509booth

We had a great time at Science Rendezvous on May 9th, 2015!

Science Rendezvous is an annual festival in Canada that takes science out of the lab and onto the street. The University of Toronto is one of the event sites, and SciNet has been part of this event for many years.

At the SciNet booth, explorers of all ages found out how researchers use computers for discovery. They saw how even simple computer simulations that you can run in your web browser or laptop can teach them important facts about how complex systems behave.

The most popular demonstration seemed to be slingshot, a game where the aim is to fire a laser beam towards a target (spaceship) through a set of black holes that change the beam’s trajectory. Other interactive simulations were a bouncing ball on a vibrating plate, a forest fire web application, and an ecological simulation of rabbits and wolves (the latter two are available at shodor.org).

Many thanks to the organizers who made this possible, and to everyone who turned out on a Saturday to discover science!

 

 

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