Events for winter-spring 2024
To receive future news and emails about the BC DRI Group and the Prairies DRI Group training events, please subscribe here.
Table of Contents: Webinars • Online courses • In-person schools • Other bootcamps and workshops
Webinars
BC DRI + Prairies DRI bi-weekly Research Computing webinars take place every second Tuesday at 11am Pacific / noon Mountain / 1pm Central.
| DATE | TOPIC | SPEAKER |
|---|---|---|
| Jan-09 | Command-line image processing with ImageMagick | Alex Razoumov (SFU) |
| Jan-23 | AI-powered coding with GitHub Copilot | Marie-Hélène Burle (SFU) |
| Feb-20 | Photogrammetry on HPC clusters | Alex Razoumov (SFU) |
| Mar-05 | Modern Emacs: all those new tools that make Emacs better and faster | Marie-Hélène Burle (SFU) |
| Mar-19 | Things researchers should know before using Generative AI | Jillian Anderson (SFU) |
| Apr-16 | JAX: a framework for high-performance array computing | Marie-Hélène Burle (SFU) |
| Apr-23 | Lossy data compression | Alex Razoumov (SFU) |
| Apr-30 | Julia at full tilt: profiling and optimizations | Paul Schrimpf (UBC) |
| May-14 | DataFrames on steroids with Polars | Marie-Hélène Burle (SFU) |
Online courses
We offer weekly online sessions on advanced research computing. These sessions take place every Thursday from 10am to noon Pacific and are open to all academic researchers across Canada. Most courses span 2 weeks, although some courses may be shorter or longer.
Please note that these sessions are not recorded, as we want to encourage attendance and live interaction, and we are planning to repeat the most popular / introductory sessions throughout the year.
| COURSE | DATES | INSTRUCTOR |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction to HPC | Jan-11, Jan-18 | Alex Razoumov |
| Introduction to Apptainer containers | Jan-25 | Alex Razoumov |
| Parallel computing in Julia | Feb-01, Feb-08 | Alex Razoumov |
| 3D scientific visualization with ParaView | Feb-22, Feb-29 | Alex Razoumov |
| Introduction to Bash command line | Mar-07, Mar-14 | Marie-Hélène Burle and Alex Razoumov |
| Version control with Git | Mar-21 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Parallel computing in Python | Mar-28, Apr-04 | Alex Razoumov |
| Introduction to JAX: a framework for high-performance array computing and automatic differentiation | Apr-11, Apr-18, Apr-25 |
Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Introduction to deep learning with Flax, a neural network framework built on JAX | May-02, May-09, May-16 |
Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Large-scale and remote visualization | May-23 | Alex Razoumov |
2024 summer school
SFU’s Research Computing 2024 Summer School will be held on June 3-7 (full week), organized in collaboration with the Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology and hosted by SFU’s Big Data Hub. It is open to all academic researchers at SFU, UBC, BCIT and other local post-secondary institutions. Researchers of all levels – undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff – are welcome to register.
You can find more details including the program on the school website, and you can register here.
Note that our colleagues at UBC are organizing an in-person summer school in July (linked in the table below) that will have some courses that we do not cover at SFU.
Bootcamps and workshops
We will be adding workshops here as they are announced at other Western Canadian universities.
| DATE | EVENT | VENUE |
|---|---|---|
| Starts Jan-19 | Univ. of Alberta Winter Bootcamp | Online |
| Feb 12-16 | HSS Winter Series 2024 | Online |
| Feb 26-28 | Introduction to programming with Python (follow-up to the 2024 HSS Winter Series) | Online |
| Feb 26-28 | Introduction to programming with R (follow-up to the 2024 HSS Winter Series) | Online |
| Starts Apr-30 | Univ. of Alberta Spring Bootcamp | Online |
| Jul 8-11 | UBC ARC 2024 Summer School | West Mall Swing Space |
As always, we welcome requests for other training topics and events. Please email suggestions to training at westdri dot ca.