Events for winter-spring 2025
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Table of Contents: Webinars • Online courses • Other local bootcamps and workshops • In-person schools
Webinars
The 2025 winter/spring webinars are jointly presented by SFU’s Research Computing Group (RCG) and UBC’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC). These webinars are held every second Tuesday at 10:00am Pacific (Victoria, Vancouver), 11:00am Mountain (Edmonton, Calgary), and noon Central (Saskatoon, Winnipeg).
| DATE | TOPIC | SPEAKER |
|---|---|---|
| Jan-21 | High-level parallel stencil computations on CPUs and GPUs in Julia | Alex Razoumov |
| Jan-28 | Modern shell utilities | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Feb-11 | Running parallel Ray workflows across multiple cluster nodes | Alex Razoumov |
| Feb-25 | Bayesian inference in JAX | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Mar-25 | Compliance or chaos: a research assessment survival guide | Luc Letarte & Jessica Galo |
| Apr-08 | Introduction to Globus | Ben Lai & Michael Tang |
| Apr-22 | Cybersecurity hygiene | Scott Baker |
| May-06 | Managing Python packages, versions, and projects with uv | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| May-20 | Workflow hacks for large datasets in HPC | Alex Razoumov |
Online courses
SFU Research Computing offers 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 the Unix shell | Jan-16, Jan-23 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Introduction to HPC | Jan-30, Feb-06, Feb-13 |
Alex Razoumov |
| High-performance R | Feb-27, Mar-06 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Scientific visualization | Mar-13 | Alex Razoumov |
| Parallel Julia | Mar-20, Mar-27 | Alex Razoumov |
| Deep learning with JAX | Apr-03, Apr-10, Apr-17 |
Marie-Hélène Burle |
| HPC Python | Apr-24, May-01, May-08 |
Alex Razoumov |
| Parallel programming in Chapel | May-15, May-22 | Alex Razoumov |
Bootcamps and workshops
We will be adding workshops here as they are announced at other Western Canadian universities.
| DATE | EVENT | VENUE |
|---|---|---|
| Starts May-02 | Univ. of Alberta Spring Bootcamp | Online |
Summer school
SFU’s 2025 week-long Research Computing Summer School took place from June 9th to 13th. This year’s program offered a hands-on introduction to essential tools and concepts in modern scientific computing and data-intensive research, with an emphasis on efficient, reproducible, and scalable workflows. Through a combination of guided instruction and practical sessions, attendees developed the skills needed to navigate computational environments, manage and optimize research code, and harness the power of high-performance computing.
- Day 1: Linux command line - full-day
- Day 2: High-performance computing (HPC) - full-day
- Day 3: Version control with Git - morning
- Day 3: Make your R code faster (serial optimization in R) - afternoon
- Day 4: Practical hands-on session: working on a Git project of your choice - morning
- Day 4: First dive into parallel programming with Chapel - afternoon
- Day 5: Accelerated computing with Python - full-day
The school was open to all researchers at SFU and other Canadian post-secondary institutions. For more details, please visit the school website.
As always, we welcome requests for other training topics and events. Please email suggestions to training at westdri dot ca.