Best Practices and Tools for High Performance Computing

The Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services (NRIS) is offering a best practices and tools course for users of national infrastructure services.

The workshop is organised as a series of monthly events during the spring semester 2025. During these monthly training, each topic will focus on different aspects related to the everyday usage of HPC/Storage facilities in order to facilitate a valuable and productive framework to develop your research.

The course is open to all and free of charge, but registration is mandatory.

Targeted Audience: The course is aimed at students, researchers and employees who want to upskill their knowledge of the usage of HPC and storage facilities. This is a follow-up course to the NRIS HPC on-boarding course (although it is not a prerequisite, but we expect the participants to have basic HPC knowledge). Being familiar with basics tools used with HPC and remote computing is fundamental for this course. Familiarize yourself with the Linux command line. You can watch our past HPC onboarding training here.

Here below you find the list of episodes and how to register. Episodes are self-contained, you can join only for the episodes that are useful for your research.

Episode 1: 21/01/2025 (10:00-12:00 CET)- How to parallelize independent tasks on HPC

Content: Sometimes you need to run many similar calculations. Instead of running them one after the other and managing many job scripts or writing elaborate shell scripts, we will learn how to run them potentially at the same time using a workflow manager without writing many job scripts. We will demonstrate and practice this using Snakemake. If your calculation is a for-loop in Python or R and it takes too long to run, this session is for you.

Registration: Please register at this link

Instructor

  • Radovan Bast

Episode 2: 11/02/2025 (10:00-12:00 CET)- Advanced shell scripting and utilities

Content: The focus will be on advance shell scripting, shell best practices and utilities like sed & awk to streamline operations and ensuring efficiency.

Registration: Please register at this link

Instructor

  • Ole Saastad

Episode 3: 11/03/2025 (10:00-12:00 CET)- Containers on clusters

Content: The focus will be on containers with Apptainer/Singularity, how to build containers for HPC, how and when to use containers on clusters, and other practical examples with containers

Registration: Please register at this link

Instructor

  • Sabry Razick

Coordinator

  • Dhanya Pushpadas

Practical Information

  • This is an online course via zoom. Participants require access to a computer (not provided by the course organisers) with internet connectivity.

Note

It is not mandatory to have account on national HPCs to attend the course. Participants can follow the lectures and demos without having an account on national resources since the course content is applicable to all HPCs. If you are an existing user, kindly provide your username while registering. You will get access to the training project. If you wish to set up user account, you can apply for one. The application page is available here and and documentation for the application procedure is available here. You are applying for an HPC account. For the project, please select NN9970K: Training and Outreach, choose Saga and Fram under Resources, set the account start date as the date of apply and the account end date to 2025-05-30.

Code of Conduct

All participants in our course are expected to show respect and courtesy to others. We follow carpentry code of conduct. If you believe someone is violating the Code of Conduct, we ask that you report it to the training team.

Contact us

You can always contact us by sending an email to support@nris.no.

If you want to receive further information about training events, and other announcements about IT resources and services for researchers, there are a couple of information channels you can subscribe to: