Working with advanced computing facilities such as Wahab and Turing HPC clusters requires a lot of skills in order to be effective and successful. To support our users as well as general ODU community to be effective at computing for their research, the Research Computing Services offers a variety of trainings and educational resources. Unless otherwise indicated, all our training events and resources are freely available.
We offer various types of training:
Hands-on workshops introduces practical, technical topics by guiding learners through a set of interactive hands-on acivities. Learners are expected to use their laptops or desktop computers and follow along the activities and exercises to become familiar with the topics. In addition to the instructors, there are assistants to help learners with questions or technical difficulties. Hands-on workshops vary in length, which can be as short as 2-3 hours to two full days.
Webinars are shorter online training events (usually about 1 hour long) introducing a specific topic of interest. The goal of webinars is to provide a general idea of the topic, without going too deep into the details. Webinars may include hands-on demonstrations, but these are not necessarily meant to be followed or reproduced by learners on the spot. Pointers to additional learning materials will be provided to facilitate further learning.
Whenever possible, we strive to record the training events and make the recordings available to ODU community and beyond. In addition, there are other training opportunities offered by related research computing entities such as XSEDE, various supercomputing centers, and many others. We will share information regarding these external training events that may benefit our community.
NEW! (October 2022) Raw recordings of the past recent training workshops have been made available online. Please see Raw Workshop Recordings below to access them for your own learning purposes.
This is a 2-3 hour hands-on workshop introducing basic skills to work with ODU HPC clusters (Wahab and Turing), focusing on the interaction with the SLURM job scheduler on the command-line interface. The material was based on "hpc-intro" lesson developed by HPC Carpentry, tailored to ODU specific environment. We offer this workshop at least once every semester (Fall and Spring). A complete recording of a past workshop is available.
Please visit Training: Introduction to HPC to learn more and replay the recordings.
This 1-hour webinar provides a quick overview of Open OnDemand, a modern, web-based interface to supercomputers. Open OnDemand provides a gentler interface to accessing HPC, managing data, editing text files, and interactive computing (Jupyter and RStudio), all through a web browser.
Recent webinar recording (2020): https://odumedia.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_7p9dtnua
DeapSECURE is a unique hands-on computational training developed by ODU School of Cybersecurity, Department of Computer Modeling and Simulation and Engineering and Research Computing Services, aimed at introducing HPC, big data, machine learning, and basic parallel programming with applications to cybersecurity domain. It consists of six modules, each offered as a three-hour workshop, utilizing Wahab as the HPC platform. In the future, RCS may offer DeapSECURE topics as additional hands-on workshops. For the time being, interested learners are encouraged to visit the project's website, https://deapsecure.gitlab.io/, from which they will be able to find our lessons modules. As of Fall 2021, work is still underway to curate and complete all the training resources. Once completed, all the hands-on materials as well as past workshop recordings will be available to download for self-study.
A few snippets of DeapSECURE workshop recordings are available, covering primarily the essentials of UNIX shell. We expect that a complete recording of DeapSECURE topics would be available by Summer 2022.
The Carpentries develops hands-on lessons on computing skills that are essential for research. A standard Software Carpentry workshop is a two-day workshop teaching UNIX shell, Python or R programming language, and Git version control system. We have been offering Software Carpentry either as a full workshop or as topical workshops.
This NVIDIA workshop reviews the fundamentals of deep learning.
Recent webinar recordings (2024)
Day 1: https://odumedia.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/Nvidia+Fundamentals+of+Deep+Learning+Workshop+-+Session+1/1_q6vze2uv
Day 2: https://odumedia.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/Nvidia+Fundamentals+of+Deep+Learning+Workshop+-+Session+2/1_ckmjkqxf
Introduction to HPC, UNIX Shell, and Python, a series of topical workshops, January-February 2020.
Software Carpentry (UNIX Shell, Python, Git), August 2019.
Software Carpentry (UNIX Shell, R, Git), October 2018. Sponsored by the DataUp program of South Big Data Hub.
We now make the raw recordings of the recent Research Computing workshops available for the benefit of ODU students, faculty, and staff members. Please visit https://wiki.hpc.odu.edu/ODU/workshop-recordings to view the available workshop recordings. We plan to upload more contents as we are able to offer more training workshops to our community.
Due to the unedited nature of raw recordings, these are only available to people with ODU credentials (MIDAS ID and password). Please refer to this instruction page on how to login and access the protected contents. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Topics available:
Prior to the pandemic, ODU has been partnering with XSEDE and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to offer a satellite site of the XSEDE Monthly HPC workshops. The workshops are taught live from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. These are hands-on workshops covering intermediate and advanced computing topics such as MPI, OpenMP, OpenACC (GPU), and Big Data/Machine Learning. During the pandemic, this training has been converted to a webcast format. Please visit https://www.psc.edu/resources/training/hpc-workshop-series to learn more and register to attend the workshop.