More than 200 clients attended OSC training sessions this past year, most at their home institution. OSC training and education experts visit campuses all around the state to provide personalized instruction, facilitate classroom projects, train students on the basics of supercomputing, and demonstrate OSC’s broad service offerings. This takes an instructional load off faculty members so their time is maximized to focus on content and solving problems.
Workshops
New groups, departments, and disciplines just starting to use high performance computing (HPC) face the challenge of users who don’t have seasoned colleagues to turn to within their own department or college who have used OSC previously.
OSC is addressing this learning gap through its workshops, held at a different location in Ohio each month. Though OSC has held these workshops throughout the years, this year we’ve been working to coordinate more stops throughout the state to help introduce academic clients to HPC and to address roadblocks they may have.
Our goal is to get to each of the different regions of Ohio at least once per year, if not once per semester.
OSC’s workshop for new users includes:
· An introduction to OSC
· The basics of HPC and why a client would use HPC
· Examples of projects that have been done on our systems
· What a supercomputer is
· What types of hardware we have and how a client can use them
· How to get an account
· How to create and submit a job to the batch system
· An introduction to the OnDemand web portal, so clients can access those systems.
OSC also offers more specialized workshops such as HPC for Big Data analysis, which incorporates Hadoop and Spark.
For future workshops, OSC is creating classes on profiling and debugging, optimizing code, an R workshop for HPC to accompany OnDemand, and potentially, a course for using our new NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs.
OSC can also offer an introduction workshops at a department or a research group level to meet a group’s specific needs.
Our goal with these workshops is to help more researchers more quickly discover amazing breakthroughs that benefit the entire scientific community.
