Events for winter-spring 2026
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Table of Contents: Winter Visualization Series • Webinars • Online courses • Other local bootcamps and workshops • Summer school
Summer school
SFU’s 2026 Research Computing Summer School will run June 1–5 as a week-long, in-person program open to researchers at SFU and other Canadian post-secondary institutions. For details and the full schedule, please visit the school website.
Winter Visualization Series
This year, the National Visualization Team is hosting the Winter Visualization Series, featuring 18 workshops running from January 20 to March 27. For full details and registration, please visit the Series webpage.
Webinars
To accommodate the Winter Visualization Series, our webinar season will begin on April 7, 2026. The 2026 Spring Webinars, hosted by SFU’s Research Computing Group (RCG), will take place every second Tuesday at 10:00am Pacific (Victoria, Vancouver), 11:00am Mountain (Edmonton, Calgary), and 12:00pm Central (Winnipeg).
For upcoming webinars, click the linked titles to view details or register. For past sessions, click the titles to access recordings and slides.
| DATE | TOPIC | SPEAKER |
|---|---|---|
| Apr-07 | RIP pandas, welcome Polars | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Apr-21 | Typst: a new markup typesetting system | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| May-05 | OpenStack command line in action: VMs in minutes | Alex Razoumov |
| May-19 | Two paths to Python dashboards: Shiny vs Dash | Marie-Hélène Burle & Alex Razoumov |
Online courses
SFU Research Computing hosts weekly online sessions on advanced research computing every Thursday from 10:00am to noon Pacific Time. These sessions are open to all academic researchers in Canada. Most courses span two weeks, though some may be shorter or longer. Sessions are not recorded to encourage live participation and interaction. Popular and introductory sessions are repeated throughout the year.
| COURSE | DATES | INSTRUCTOR |
|---|---|---|
| Bash for beginners | Jan-22 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| HPC for beginners | Jan-29 | Alex Razoumov |
| Introduction to Python | Feb-05, Feb-12, Feb-26 |
Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Getting started with Git | Mar-05 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Collaboration with GitHub | Mar-12 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| Parallel computing in Julia | Mar-19, Mar-26 | Alex Razoumov |
| Parallel computing in Chapel | Apr-02 | Alex Razoumov |
| GPU Python: Arrays with CuPy |
Apr-09 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| GPU Python: Numba JIT compilation to CUDA kernels |
Apr-16 | Alex Razoumov |
| GPU Python: DataFrames with Polars and RAPIDS cuDF |
Apr-23 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
| GPU programming in Chapel | Apr-30 | Alex Razoumov |
| Gen-AI with JAX for simulation data | May-07 | Alex Razoumov |
| High-performance R | May-14, May-21 | Marie-Hélène Burle |
Bootcamps and workshops
Workshops from other Western Canadian universities will be added here as they are announced.
| DATE | EVENT | VENUE |
|---|---|---|
| Jan-Feb | UofA Winter Bootcamp | Online |
| May | UofA Spring Bootcamp | Online |
As always, we welcome suggestions for additional training topics and events. Please email your ideas to training at westdri dot ca.