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 days dual stream summer school offers intensive courses on a number of selected subjects, including

  • Programming distributed systems using message passing (MPI)

  • Programming shared memory systems with threads (OpenMP and POSIX-threads)

  • Programming GPGPUs (CUDA)

  • Common programming languages: Modern Fortran, C/C++, R, Python, MATLAB/Octave etc.

  • Debugging

  • Visualization;

  • Cloud computing

  • Big data, deep learning on advanced computing facilities

Each site will have a slightly different list of courses. The summer school will include both in-class lectures and hands-on computer labs. Those who attend at least three full days cumulatively will receive an official certificate in HPC training (the exact rules can be site-specific). 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.

There have been annual training and education events offered by the three HPC consortia of Compute Ontario: SHARCNET, SciNet, and Centre for Advanced Computing, 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, the HPC Summer School has evolved to become a week-long event of intensive courses and hands-on labs ran in two parallel streams.