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International HPC Summerschool 2016 in Slovenia

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

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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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Announcing SciNet’s Data Science Certificate Program

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

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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

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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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Compute Ontario Research Day 2015

April 21, 2015 in blog-general, for_researchers, for_users, frontpage, news, Uncategorized

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The Compute Ontario Research Day 2015 will be held on Thursday, May 21 at the Cambridge campus of Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

This will be a day filled with high performance computing related research done in Ontario. Have an interesting research story for which you used high performance computing (such as the facilities at SharcNet, SciNet, and HPCVL)? Want to share you experience with other Ontario HPC users? Consider giving a talk at the meeting.
This is the preeminent provincial high performance computing event at which professors, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students gather to learn about each other’s high performance computing related work.

The program will consist contributed and poster presentations and four invited speakers:

  • Prof. James Demmel
    Department of Mathematics, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley
  • Anil K. Goel
    Vice President and Chief Architect, HANA, SAP
  • Prof. Harald Pfeiffer
    Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto
  • Prof. Aristotelis Tsirigos
    Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, New York University

This conference is sponsored by Compute Canada and Compute Ontario, and is a collaborative event between SHARCNET, SciNet, HPCVL, and Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

For more information and registration, see https://www.sharcnet.ca/events/CORD2015.

conestogaCambridgeCampus

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Two-day Intel Xeon Phi workshop in Toronto

April 6, 2015 in Uncategorized

Xeon_phi
On May 19 and 20, 2015, Intel is giving a two-day workshop in Toronto for
software developers on the foundation needed for modernizing their code to take
advantage of parallel architectures found in both the Intel Xeon processor and
the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor.

The difference with the one-day workshop on the same topic given in Toronto on
October 27, is that the second day is a hands-on lab in which you get to use the
material and techniques presented in the first day.

Topics

The first day will cover:

  • Intel Xeon Phi architecture: purpose, organization, pre-requisites for good performance, future technology
  • Programming models: native, offload, heterogeneous clustering
  • Parallel frameworks: automatic vectorization, OpenMP, MPI
  • Optimization methods: general, scalar math, vectorization, multithreading, memory access, communication and special topics

The second day will cover:

  • Offload and Native: “Hello World” to complex; using MPI.
  • Performance Analysis: VTune.
  • Case Study: All aspects of tuning in the N-body calculation.
  • Optimization I: Strip mining for vectorization, parallel reduction.
  • Optimization II: Loop tiling, thread affinity.

Location

Chestnut Residence & Conference Centre
St. Patrick’s Conference Room
89 Chestnut Street
Toronto, ON M5G 1R1

Registration

This is an external event organized by Intel. For registration please go to

Note that the first day is a prerequisite for the second.

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Big Data Challenge Day for High School Students

February 24, 2015 in for_educators, for_press, frontpage, in_the_news, news, Uncategorized

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SciNet, SAS, the computer science department at Earl Haig Secondary School in Toronto, and NRC Research Press organized a Big Data Challenge for High School Students in 2014. Selected teams presented their analysis of a real data set of grocery purchases for the jury on Friday February 13, 2015. The winners were the team from Oakville-Trafalgar High School.

Read the full article at the University of Toronto News.

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McMaster Students Create Fractal Movies Using BlueGene/Q Supercomputer

May 30, 2014 in blog, blog-general, for_educators, for_press, frontpage, in_the_news, news, Uncategorized

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Computing and software students at McMaster University created some stunning videos of fractals using the BlueGene/Q, one of the most powerful computers in the world, administered by SOSCIP and hosted by SciNet.

Read the full articles on McMaster University’s Daily News’ or on HPC wire.

The videos can be seen on YouTube.

Details on the SCOSCIP BlueGene/Q at SciNet can be found on our wiki.

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SciNet HPC Certificate Program

December 4, 2012 in for_researchers, for_users, Uncategorized

Note: an updated post can be found at http://www.scinethpc.ca/scinet-certificate-program

SciNet has been teaching courses on scientific technical computing and high performance computing for the Toronto-area research community for several years, and now offers recognition to attendees in the form of SciNet Certificates in Scientific Computing or High Performance Computing.  Courses offered by SciNet will, effective immediately, count towards these certificates.

Note that the SciNet Certificates are not University credentials, and will not appear on transcripts.  However, several SciNet courses are sometimes offered in cooperation with the Astronomy and Physics departments as graduate minicourses, which can count towards course credit; interested students in other departments are encouraged to contact SciNet and their graduate coordinator.

Requirements for these certificates are based on credit-hours of SciNet courses successfully completed.   For a “short course” (typically a day long or shorter, with no between-course homework), a lecture hour counts as one credit hour; for a “long course” with homework due between sessions, a lecture hour counts as 1.5 credit hours.

The certificate offerings are as follows; note that requirements are subject to change.  Students who have successfully taken SciNet courses before January 2013 may discuss with us having credits applied from previously-taken courses.

 

Certificate in Scientific Computing

36 credit-hours in scientific computing

This certificate indicates that the holder has successfully completed coursework in general scientific computing topics such as software development, version control, testing, visualization, and data management.

Example courses, with typical credit hours:

Certificate in High Performance Computing

36 credit-hours in HPC topics

This certificate indicates that the holder has successfully completed coursework in high performance computing topics such as programming models like OpenMP, MPI, CUDA or parallel development tools like debuggers

Example courses:

Certificate in Advanced High Performance Computing

36 course hours in advanced HPC topics

Example courses:

  • Parallel I/O – 8 credit hours
  • Adios – 1 credit hour

 

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