About Summer School

The Compute Ontario Summer School on High Performance and Technical Computing is an annual educational event for graduate/undergraduate students, postdocs and researchers who are engaged in a compute intensive research. Held geographically in the west, centre and east of the province of Ontario, the summer school provides attendees with the opportunity to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing on modern HPC platforms. The five full day summer school offers intensive courses on a number of selected subjects, which vary by location, but are generally chosen from the following list:

  • Programming distributed systems using message passing;
  • Programming shared memory systems with threads;
  • Programming GPGPUs using CUDA;
  • Common programming languages: Modern Fortran, C/C++, R, Python, etc.;
  • MATLAB computing with Octave;
  • Debugging;
  • Visualization;
  • Cloud computing;
  • And others.

The five day summer school will include both in-class lectures and hands-on computer labs on programming distributed and shared memory systems, as well as GPGPUs. Those who attend at least three full days cumulatively will receive an official certificate in HPC training.

Please be aware that registration for the summer school is a two-step process: first you pre-register by completing the Pre-Registration form on the registration page for the location you chose, and once you receive a reminder email (a few days before the event) you will need to click on the link included in the email to finalize your registration.

Prerequisites for this summer school vary depending on the sessions you choose, but all will require a basic familiarity with the Linux shell, and most will require a certain level of programming experience.

This year for the first time we will also be running a Software Carpentry event in conjunction with the Summer School West, the week before the school. The two day Software Carpentry event aims at beginners and provides instructions on basic topics such as Linux shell, source code management system Git, statistical computing environment R and an introduction to SHARCNET. You can attend either just the Software Carpentry or just the summer school, or both. To register for the Software Carpentry event, please follow the link.

The Summer School Central will have a half day session "Intro to the Linux Shell" on the first day, for participants that are new to the Linux Shell.

There have been annual training and education events offered by the three HPC consortia of Compute Ontario: SHARCNET, SciNet and Centre for Advanced Computing (formerly HPCVL), for more than a decade. Formerly the Fall Workshop, the HPC Summer School has been offered by SHARCNET since 2007, and was expanded to three provincial offerings (west, centre, and east) in 2011. Originally structured as a four-day workshop, Summer School has evolved to become a week-long event of intensive courses and hands-on labs ran in two parallel streams. For a history of training events and summer schools, please follow the link Past Summer Schools on the left menu or visit the consortium websites.

Compute Ontario HPC Summer School Organizing Committee