Welcome to the latest edition of the SNIC training newsletter.

• Training in software development tools
• Online training course: "Introduction to Git" in Umeå, 9-12 November 2021
• Training in programming
• Online training course Python for Scientific Computing Course, 25 - 28 October 2021
• Only a few places left: An introduction to parallel programming using Message Passing with MPI, 25 - 28 October 2021
• Online interactive support and discussion forum
• SNIC zoom-in - a virtual open-house: 21st October 2021 from 14:00 until 15:00
• Training events from ENCCS, recommended by SNIC
• ENCCS CUDA Workshop, 7 - 8 October 2021
• ENCCS & NSC Megatron Bootcamp, 25 - 27 October 2021
• ENCCS SYCL Workshop in collaboration with CSC and IZUM, 8 - 9 November 2021
• ENCCS/NVIDIA GPU Hackathon, 6th, 13th - 15th December 2021

Training in software development tools

Online training course: "Introduction to Git" in Umeå, 9-12 November 2021

HPC2N is offering a course, "Introduction to Git" in Umeå, 9-12 November 2021.

NOTE: This is an online-only course, and will be run over Zoom. It is a SNIC/PRACE course, and so is open for academics and people who work in industry in the PRACE member countries

The course will be an introduction to version control, with a focus on Git. Some of the main concepts, like repositories, commits, trees, branches, and merges will be covered, as will many of the basic commands, like clone, add, push, pull, commit, and fork. The lectures will be complemented by hands-on, during which the participants will learn both how to do simple Git commands as well as more complex cases. The hands-ons will mainly be done using GitHub.

For more information and registration, please visit the Git course page at HPC2N.

Training in programming

Online training course Python for Scientific Computing Course, 25 - 28 October 2021

This course is part of the Scientific Computing in Practice lecture series at Aalto University, in partnership with CodeRefinery, Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services (NRIS), and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC).

It is a medium-advanced course in Python tools such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and Pandas. It is suitable for people who have a basic understanding of basic Python and want to know some internals and important libraries for science.

For more information, please visit the course page at Aalto University.

To register from Sweden, this is the link to the form.

SNIC online training course: An introduction to parallel programming using Message Passing with MPI, 25 - 28 October 2021

The course is almost fully booked.

Message Passing is presently a widely deployed programming model in massively parallel high performance computing. Message Passing is suitable for programming a wide range of current computer architectures, ranging from multi-core desk top equipment to the fastest HPC systems in the world, offering several hundred thousand processing elements.

This online course is at the beginners level and assumes no prior experience in parallel computing. The concepts behind message passing and distributed memory computing will be introduced and the syntax of the key MPI calls will be explained.

Time: The course will run from 25th till 28th December 2020. The course will start at 09:00 and finish at 12:30 each day.

For more information and registration see:

• HPC2N MPI course page
• Lunarc MPI course page
• PDC MPI course page

Online interactive support and discussion forum

SNIC zoom-in - a virtual open-house: 21st October 2021 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 the SNIC centres 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.

Next zoom-in session: 21 October from 14:00 until 15:00

For more information and details on access, please visit the LUNARC zoom-in page.

Training events from ENCCS, recommended by SNIC

ENCCS CUDA Workshop, 7 - 8 October 2021

These course materials are developed for those who wants to leark GPU programming with CUDA from the beginning. The course consists of lectures, type-along and hands-on sessions.

During the first day, we will cover the architecture of the GPU accelerators, basic usage of CUDA, and how to control data movement between CPUs and GPUs. The second day focuses on more advanced topics, such as how to optimize computational kernels for efficient execution on GPU hardware and how to explore the task-based parallelism using streams and events. We will also briefly go through profiling tools that can help one to identify the computational bottleneck of the applications.

For more information and registration, please visit the CUDA workshop page at ENCCS.

ENCCS & NSC Megatron Bootcamp, 25 - 27 October 2021

The ENCCS & NSC Megatron Bootcamp provides exciting opportunities for participants to train GPT models with NVIDIA Megatron-LM under the guidance of expert mentors from National Labs, Universities, and Industry leaders in a collaborative environment.

This 3-day Bootcamp is designed to give NLP researchers a step-wised overview of the fundamentals of NVIDIA Megatron-LM ( NVIDIA open-source framework for training very large language models). The event will have many hands-on exercises complemented by tutorials, code snippets, and presentations to help you kick-start training your GPT Megatron models for your own language.

For more information and registration, please visit the Megatron Bootcamp page at ENCCS.

ENCCS SYCL Workshop in collaboration with CSC and IZUM, 8 - 9 November 2021

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. You will learn to:

• Use the hipSYCL compiler to generate executable 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.

For more information and registration, please visit the SYCL workshop page at ENCCS.

ENCCS/NVIDIA GPU Hackathon: 6th, 13th - 15th December 2021

Together with NVIDIA and NSC, ENCCS orgnises GPU Hackathons to provide exciting opportunities for scientists to accelerate their AI research or HPC codes under the guidance of expert mentors from National Labs, Universities and Industry leaders in a collaborative environment. Teams of researchers are paired with experienced GPU mentors to learn and apply the accelerated and parallel computing skills needed by the scientific community. Both current or prospective users of large hybrid CPU/GPU HPC clusters who develop HPC and AI applications that could benefit from GPU acceleration are encouraged to participate!

The ENCCS hackathon will be designed for teams to work in productive sprint sessions with expert mentors for a full week. A wide variety of different projects are possible, for example:

• Accelerating applications written in common languages – C/C++, Fortran, Python
• Using OpenACC to gradually offload work to GPUs and incrementally improving the performance
• Identifying expensive kernels and porting them to CUDA
• Profiling already GPU accelerated applications to find hotspots for further acceleration

The event is supported by WASP and NSC through the access to BerzeLiUs system.

Please register at the ENCCS/NVIDIA GPU Hackathon 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.