HPC On-boarding October 13-15 2026

The Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services (NRIS) is offering an on-boarding hands-on course for new users of high performance computing (HPC) systems.

Targeted Audience: The course is aimed at students, researchers and employees of any background, and is highly recommended for all new users of the national HPC systems (Saga, Betzy, Olivia). We assume no prior knowledge of what an HPC is or how to use it. For those with little experience using UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux or working on the command line of a terminal, the first day of the course is designed specifically for you.

The course is open to all and free of charge.

Registration

Register here via Google Forms (form closes October 7th).

Practical Information

This is an online course via Zoom. Participants require access to a computer (not provided by the course organisers) with internet connectivity and pre-installed programs to participate in the video meeting of the course (Zoom) and to access the HPC systems (e.g. ssh).

Time, date (all times CEST)

Date	Time	Topic
Mon 12.10	09:00 - 10:00	Login check session (for all)
Tue 13.10	09:00 - 12:30	Linux for HPC Day 0(for UNIX-novices)
Wed 14.10	09:00 - 12:30	HPC On-boarding Day 1 (for all)
Thu 15.10	09:00 - 12:30	HPC On-boarding Day 2 (for all)

Detailed schedule

Day 0: Linux for HPC (Tuesday October 13th)

09:00-09:05 Welcome and practical information
09:05-09:35 The terminal and remote login
09:35-10:05 Moving around and looking at things (including exercise)
10:05-10:15 Break
10:15-10:50 Finding things (including exercises)
10:50-11:00 Break
11:00-11:30 Create/modify files
11:30-12:00 Composing commands with pipes
12:00-12:20 Scripting
12:20-12:30 Wrap-up discussion

Day 1: HPC Intro (Wednesday October 14th)

09:00-09:05 Welcome and practical information
09:05-09:30 Why use a cluster?
09:30-10:00 Working on a remote HPC system
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-11:30 Scheduling jobs (including exercises)
11:30-11:40 Break
11:40-12:10 Transferring files
12:10-12:30 Wrap-up and discussion

Day 2: HPC Intro (Thursday October 15th)

09:00-09:05 Welcome and practical information
09:05-10:10 Accessing software (including exercises)
10:10-10:25 Compute and storage quota
11:00-11:20 Using shared resources responsibly
11:20-11:35 Break
11:35-12:00 How to ask for help
12:00-12:20 Short quiz (non-compulsory)
12:20-12:30 Wrap-up and discussion

You can always contact our support team.

User Account and connection verification: For all course participants, we want to make sure that you are able to log in an follow the practical parts of the course - thus we organise a login help session on October 12th 09:00-10:00. Note that this is compulsory in the sense that if you later experience access challenges, you are low on the assistance priority list. We use the same Zoom link as for the rest of the course for this login help session.

Course material

Course material will be mostly based on our training tutorial:

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 either report to the zoom host right away or write to the training team.

Instructors

Morten Ledum
Ole Widar Saastad
Bjørn Lindi
Maiken Pedersen
Richard Topouchian
Jörn Dietze
Siri Kallhovd
Eirik Skjerve

Coordinator

Eirik Skjerve