Welcome to the latest edition of the SNIC newsletter.  We remind on the introduction event at NSC.  Registration for the PDC summer school in HPC has just opened.  Please also pay attention to the ENCCS training events advertised in this newsletter.

• Training for new users
• Online training and support event: “NSC introduction to Tetralith/Sigma”, 26 April 2022 at 10:00
• HPC summer school
• PDC Summer School 2022: Introduction to High Performance Computing, 15-26 August 2022
• Training events from ENCCS
• ENCCS SYCL Workshop, 19-21 April
• ENCCS Online Workshop: Upscaling A.I. Workflows, 25-26 April
• ENCCS Online Workshop: High Performance Data Analytics in Python, 18-20 May 2022
• ENCCS Online Workshop: Introduction to Quantum Computing & Hybrid HPC-QC Systems, 8-9 June 2022

Training for new users

Online training and support event: “NSC introduction to Tetralith/Sigma”, 26 April 2022 at 10:00

An online event with two parts:

• A short introduction suitable for new users to the NSC Tetralith (SNIC) and Sigma (LiU) clusters. Topics include the module system, submitting jobs, working with Python, allocating GPU:s for simulations or graphics and other useful information.
• An open session for questions with several NSC application experts attending.

Feel free to join (and leave) whenever depending on your interest. The online event is open for all present and prospective NSC users.

Time: 26 Apr 2022, 10:00 - ca. 11:15 Introduction, ca 11:15 - Open session

Zoom:

• NCS Zoom link
• Meeting ID: 698 898 0503
• Passcode: 6692458934

The presentation will be available on the NSC event page.

HPC summer school

PDC Summer School 2022: Introduction to High Performance Computing, 15-26 August 2022

The PDC Center for High Performance Computing (PDC) and the KTH School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) welcome you to our "Introduction to High Performance Computing" summer school.  Interested students and researchers (with academic or industrial/commercial backgrounds) from anywhere in the world are welcome to apply to attend the course.  This course provides the skills needed to utilise high-performance computing (HPC) resources, and includes an introduction to a range of important topics, such as:

• parallel algorithms
• parallel programming
• modern HPC architectures
• performance analysis and engineering
• software engineering

The course targets, in particular, computational and data scientists and therefore connections to different HPC use cases will be used to help illustrate these topics. The course consists of both lectures and guided hands-on lab sessions.

More information about the school, including a link to the application form, is available on the 2022 PDC Summer School webpage.

The deadline for applications is the 30 May 2022

Training events from ENCCS

ENCCS SYCL Workshop, April 19-21, 9:00-12:10 CEST

Welcome to this SYCL workshop! SYCL is a C++ abstraction layer for programming heterogeneous hardware with a single-source approach. SYCL is high-level, cross-platform, and extends standard ISO C++17. There are numerous compilers implementing the SYCL standard and they use different backends to target CPUs, GPUs, and even specialized hardware such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and vector engines.

In this online workshop you will learn to:

• Use the hipSYCL compiler to generate executables for multiple hardware targets.
• Write hardware-agnostic code to express parallelism using the queue, command group, and kernel abstractions.
• Use buffer and accessors to handle memory across devices.
• Evaluate drawbacks and advantages of unified shared memory.

Further information and registration at the SYCL workshop page at ENCCS.

ENCCS Online Workshop: Upscaling A.I. Workflows, 25-26 April 9:00-12:15 CET

Supervised training of large networks requires large labeled datasets, which in turn demand high computational costs. While active practitioners in deep learning primarily develop and train their networks on local computing devices, with the increase of networks complexity, there is an urgent need to create, train, and test large networks on clusters. In this workshop, we overview the basics of Docker and Singularity. (Working knowledge of Singularity as given in the UppMAX workshop “Basic Singularity” is desirable.) Distributed training using TensorFlow and Horovod frameworks on a supercomputer will be covered. Moreover, it will be shown how to use Singularity containers in conjunction with TensorFlow and Horovod to upscale an AI app.

The workshop will be entirely online using zoom.

After the workshop, the participants will ideally be able to:

• Create, deploy, and update containers locally on a supercomputer
• Upscale the transfer learning of an NLP model in TensorFlow
• Upscale the transfer learning of an NLP model using Horovod
• Upscale the transfer learning of a containerized NLP model

For further information and registration, see the A.I. workflows workshop page at ENCCS.

High Performance Data Analytics in Python, online workshop, 18-20 May 2022

Python is an industry-standard programming language for working with data on all levels of the data analytics pipeline, thanks to the rich ecosystem of libraries ranging from generic numerical libraries to special-purpose and/or domain-specific packages which are often supported by large developer communities and stable funding sources.

This online workshop from ENCCS is meant to give an overview of working with research data in Python using general libraries for storing, processing, analysing 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).

Further information and registration can be found on the high performance data analytics workshop page at ENCCS.

Introduction to Quantum Computing & Hybrid HPC-QC Systems, online workshop. 9:00-16:00, June 8-9 2022

Recent developments in quantum technology are bringing the world closer to a new technological revolution – the advent of usable quantum computers able to provide enormous acceleration to important computational tasks . In coming years, quantum computing is expected to have a huge impact on practically all areas of research that can utilise computational modelling.

ENCCS is now joining forces with the new NordIQuEst project to deliver a two-day training workshop covering the fundamentals of quantum computing (QC), including:

• Introduction to key concepts: quantum states, qubits, quantum algorithms
• QC programming in high-level languages for use cases in optimisation, finance and quantum chemistry followed by testing quantum programs to esure their correctness
• Overview of the main QC hardware approaches
• Integration of QC with classical computing: hybrid classical/quantum algorithms and HPC-QC systems

Morning lectures are combined with afternoon hands-on sessions where participants learn to use high-level QC programming languages using simulators, as well as real QC hardware.

For further information and registration, see the quantum computing workshop page at ENCCS.

Training overview

SNIC training webpage

In addition to these news letters we also provide a SNIC training webpage.

This webpage currently gives an overview on all courses currently planned. It provides links to more information and the actual registration. The webpage also includes training which is expected to be mostly of interest to individual SNIC centres. Information will be added to this page as it becomes available.