Welcome to the last edition of the NAISS training newsletter of 2025.  In addition to the events published in December we have added five more events.  This includes our new workshop “Transferring Files to and from HPC Clusters”.

We had to move our interactive support session Zoom-in to 30th January.

ENCCS asked us to share some of their events.

The NAISS training team wishes everyone a successful 2025

Overview

NAISS training

• Online training seminar: Introduction seminar for Alvis users, 15 January 2025
• Online training workshop: "Awk workshop”, 16-17 January, 2025
• Online course: Introduction to Linux, 21 January 2025, 09:00-12:00
• Online training seminar: Cluster architecture and job submission, 4 February 2025 at 13:30
• Corrected dates for online training course: Introduction to Pandas for data science, 11 - 12 February
• Online training workshop: Basic Singularity Running and building Singularity containers - 13 February, 2025
• Online course: Introduction to Python, March 4, 2025
• Online training seminar: Introduction seminar for Alvis users, 5 March 2025
• Online workshop: Transferring Files to/from HPC Clusters, 7 March 2025
• Online workshop: Introduction to Bianca: Handling Sensitive Research Data, 19 March 2025
• Online course: Introduction to running R, Matlab, and Julia in HPC, 24-26 March 2025

Online interactive support and discussion forum:

• Changed date: NAISS Zoom-in - a virtual open-house, 30 January from 14:00 until 15:00
• NAISS Zoom-in - a virtual open-house, 13 March from 14:00 until 15:00

University events

• Online course: Introduction to Kebnekaise, 22 January 2025, 09:00-17:00
• Online course: Introduction to Linux and UPPMAX, February 10-12, 2025

ENCCS training

• Online workshop: High-Performance Data Analytics with Python (online), 21 - 23 January
• Online workshop: Julia for High-Performance Data Analysis (Online), 4 - 7 February
• Publicly available training material
• Training events from around Europe

NAISS training

Online training seminar: Introduction seminar for Alvis users, 15 January 2025

Description: This seminar is for new and prospective users of the NAISS cluster for AI/ML, Alvis. You will learn all that you need to know to get started on the system.

Time: January 15 13:15-15:00

Registration: Alvis January event registration form (Chalmers)

Online training workshop: "Awk workshop” - 16-17 January, 2025

Collaboration between UPPMAX and NBIS

Awk is an interpreted programming language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool.

This two-day workshop aims to promote and demonstrate the flexibility of the tool, where the overhead of more sophisticated approaches and programming languages is not worth the bother.

Learn how to

• use Awk as an advanced grep command, capable of arithmetic selection rules with control over the content of the matched lines
• perform simple conversions, analysis or filter you data on the fly making it easy to plot or read in your favorite research tool
• handle and take advantage of data split over multiple file data sets
• use Awk as simple function or data generator
• perform simple sanity checks on your results

The workshop aims to promote the awk tool for use in everyday research work and urges you to find solutions yourself rather than expecting ready-made ones. The material given during the seminar will not be a complete guide or a manual but rather an overview of the capabilities, particular strengths, and common disadvantages.

When: 16-17, January, 2025

Where: online via Zoom

Registration: Awk workshop registration form (Google)

For more information and registration, please visit the Awk workshop page (UPPMAX).

Online course: Introduction to Linux, 21 January 2025, 09:00-12:00

This 3-hour online course is an introduction to the Linux operating system (OS) that is used on most Swedish compute clusters, and is the most common OS in HPC clusters all over the planet. The course will consist of lectures, code-alongs, and interspersed exercises.

This NAISS course is meant for beginners to the Linux operating system, and is open to all users in Swedish academia.

Time and date: 21 January 2025, 09:00-12:00

More information and registration on the Linux course page (HPC2N).

Online training seminar: Cluster architecture and job submission, 4 February 2025 at 13:30

This event explains key features of a contemporary HPC cluster, such as deployed at LUNARC and throughout NAISS.  It will explain the principles behind the job scheduler and how the scheduler can be used to accomplish your computational work in an efficient manner.  The examples will utilise the SLURM scheduler, which is deployed on the NAISS resources.

The event is organised as an online seminar.  The seminar addresses users who have recently started using HPC systems and prospective users considering using an HPC system in the near future.

Time: 4 February at 13:30

For more information and registration, plese visit the cluster architecture and job submission event page (LUNARC).

Corrected date for online training course: Introduction to Pandas for data science, LUNARC, 11 - 12 Feb 2025

Pandas is a powerful, popular Python package for cleaning, manipulating, and statistically analyzing large tabular data sets.  It is particularly useful in preparation for AI/ML applications and publication-ready visualization. Originally developed for financial panel data, it is now used by data scientists in a huge variety of fields, from marketing to medicine to astronomy.  Pandas is capable of handling data sets of several Gigabytes.

This course will introduce the core Pandas data types, basic input/output routines, data selection and filtering, data inspection and cleaning methods, built-in and user-defined functions for data manipulation, hierarchical data structures, and some built-in visualization methods. There will be a mix of static examples and live demonstrations via Jupyter notebook, and exercises will be provided to complement the lecture materials.

For more information and access to registration, please visit the Pandas course page (LUNARC).

Online training workshop: Basic Singularity Running and building Singularity containers - 13 February, 2025

Collaboration between UPPMAX and HPC2N

The online workshop is an introduction to the basic concepts of containerised software environment solutions within the Singularity framework (Sylabs).

During the workshop you will have the opportunity to follow the interactive guide on

• how to run Singularity containers
• how to build your own
• good (and bad) practices on designing and building Singularity recipes
• build and/or host container remotely and what are the limitations

To fully benefit from the workshop, basic Linux system administration experience is highly desirable i.e. knowledge of package management and common tools for building and managing software: git, pip, conda, wget, curl, …

Please follow the instructions to install Singularity (GitHub) on your computer before the workshop.

When: 13 February, 2025

Where: online via Zoom

Registration: Singularity workshop registration form (Google)

For more information and registration, please visit the singularity workshop page (UPPMAX)

Online course: Introduction to Python, March 4, 2025

This 1-day course helps you get started with Python, by working through an online and free book. We make use of HPC clusters to write and run Python code. The pace of this highly interactive course is set by the majority of learners, ensuring that any complete beginner has enough time for exercises. At the end of the day, you should feel comfortable with the basics of Python and feel familiar to a book on Python to help you on your next steps.

When: Tuesday, March 4, 2025, 09:00-16:00

Where: online via Zoom

For more information and registration, please visit the Python introduction course page (UPPMAX).

Online training seminar: Introduction seminar for Alvis users, 5 March 2025

Description: This seminar is for new and prospective users of the NAISS cluster for AI/ML, Alvis. You will learn all that you need to know to get started on the system.

Time: January 15 13:15-15:00

Registration: Alvis March event registration form (Chalmers)

Online workshop: Transferring Files to/from HPC Clusters, March 7, 2025

In this 3-hour workshop you learn to transfer files to and from Swedish academic HPC clusters. We will cover graphical as well as terminal tools and you will work highly interactively. At the end of the day, you should be comfortable in transferring files between your local computer and a cluster and cross-clusters, and choosing the right tools for your use cases.

The workshop is intended for beginner users but with some Linux experience, see the course link below. You do not need to be a member of a NAISS project in order to join the workshop. A course project on one of the NAISS clusters will be available to those.

When: Tuesday, March 7 2025, 09:00-12:00

Where: online via Zoom

For more information and registration, please visit the file transfer worksop page (UPPMAX).

Online workshop: Introduction to Bianca: Handling Sensitive Research Data, March 19, 2025

Are you just beginning to work with sensitive data in your research? If yes, welcome to a 1-day introduction to handling sensitive data on the UPPMAX cluster, Bianca. We will tell you about NAISS-SENS, how to login to Bianca, transfer files via wharf, basics of the SLURM workload manager and the module system.

The workshop is intended for beginner users of the Bianca cluster.

You do not need to be a member of a NAISS-SENS project in order to join the workshop. A SUPR course project will be available to all participants. The workshop will consist of both lectures and exercise sessions.

When: Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Where: online via Zoom

For more information and registration please visit the Bianca workshop page (UPPMAX).

Online course: Introduction to running R, Matlab, and Julia in HPC, 24-26 March 2025

Cooperation between HPC2N, LUNARC and UPPMAX

Learn how to run R, Matlab, and Julia at Swedish HPC centres, mainly using Tetralith on NSC as an example.  We will show you how to find and load the needed modules, how to write a batch script for R, Matlab, and Julia, submitting jobs from inside Matlab, as well as how to install and use your own packages, and more.  The course will consist of lectures interspersed with hands-on sessions where you get to try out what you have just learned.

This course will consist of three days.  Each day starts at 9:00 and closes 16:00.  One day for each language.

Participation is free and open to all current and prospective users of NAISS.

Time and date: 09:00 - 16:00, 24-26 March 2025

Location: online via Zoom

For more information and registration, see:

• The R, Matlab, and Julia course page at HPC2N
• The R, Matlab, and Julia course page at UPPMAX

Online interactive support and discussion forum

Change of date: NAISS Zoom-in - a virtual open-house, 30 January from 14:00 until 15:00

You are invited to a virtual meeting room.  Inside the meeting room we like to discuss services offered by NAISS and how they can be used for your computational needs, help you process your data and visualise your results.  Participants are highly encouraged to pose their own questions.

We also expect to have experts available from C3SE, HPC2N and LUNARC, to discuss the University operated HPC services at Chalmers, Umeå and Lund University.

The zoom-link for the session will be announced closer to the event.

The following NAISS Zoom-in is planned for 13 March 2025

University events

Online course: Introduction to Kebnekaise, 22 January 2025, 09:00-17:00

In this course we begin with an introduction to HPC and HPC2N, before going on to a walk-through of the Kebnekaise system, including the newest hardware.

After that, we go through the module system and take a look at how to submit jobs. During the hands-on you will get the opportunity to try loading modules, compile a program, and submit a job to the Kebnekaise cluster. We will look at how to use both the different types of CPUs, and the different types of GPUs.

Eligibility: since Kebnekaise is no longer a NAISS cluster, this course in only available to local users. This is defined as users who are current or future members of projects with a PI affiliated with HPC2N's partner sites (UmU, SLU, LTU, MIUN, IRF). Participation is free.

Time and date: 22 January 2025, 09:00-17:00

More information and registration, please visit the Kebnekaise introduction course page (HPC2N).

Online course: Introduction to Linux and UPPMAX, February 10-12, 2025

This 3-day course provides an introduction to the high-performance computing (HPC) environment offered at UPPMAX.

It offers an overview on how the systems work and covers skills from basic Linux usage to more advanced tips and tricks. The lectures covering Linux and bash scripting are cluster-agnostic and may be attended by non-UPPMAX users as well.

When: February 10-12, 2025

Where: online via Zoom

For more information and registration, please visit the Linux and UPPMAX introduction course page (UPPMAX).

ENCCS training

Online workshop: High-Performance Data Analytics with Python (online), 21 - 23 January

Abstract: This three half-day online workshop is meant to give an overview of working with research data in Python using general libraries for storing, processing, analyzing and sharing data. The focus is on improving performance. After covering tools for performant processing (netcdf, numpy, pandas, scipy) on single workstations the focus shifts to parallel, distributed and GPU computing (snakemake, numba, dask, multiprocessing, mpi4py).

Detailed information at the HPDA with Python workshop page (ENCCS).

Time: Jan. 21-23, 09:00-12:00 (CET) (2025).

Online workshop: Julia for High-Performance Data Analysis (Online), 4 - 7 February

Abstract: This online workshop will start by briefly covering the basics of Julia’s syntax and features, and then introduce methods and libraries which are useful for analyzing and visualizing large datasets using dataframes and visualization packages.

Detailed information at webpage: the HPDA with Julia workshop page (ENCCS).

Time: Feb. 4-7, 09:00-12:00 (CET) (2025).

Publicly available training material

ENCCS develops and maintains a library of training material on topics in HPC, AI and Quantum Computing which is suitable for self-paced learning, see the training library at ENCCS.

Training events from around Europe

Many HPC centres and National Competence Centres around Europe offer diverse HPC training workshops open to anyone in Europe, many of which are online. Upcoming workshops can be found at the European HPC Portal.