Research Computing Training

Learning how to use the High Performance Compute (HPC) technology tools to streamline and improve research outputs is essential to remaining world-leaders in the research field.

The University of Adelaide provides onsite and online training designed specifically for researchers using HPC technology. Due to the breath of technology requirements there are partners outside the University that offer training you may find relevant and beneficial in achieving improved research outputs. 

  • University Managed Training

    Phoenix HPC

    Phoenix is an on premise HPC service that enables the processing of big data, complex models and simulations in significantly reduced timeframes to desktop computers. 

    Online training

    If you are new to Phoenix, you will first need to complete the course in MyUni. This course has been designed to provide researchers with a basic understanding of High Performance Computing and the complexities of Phoenix. This training is available for University of Adelaide staff and students and is free to complete. 

    HPC Wiki

    The HPC Wiki provides self-help and online guidelines on the use of Phoenix. 

    In person training

    Occasionally our HPC specialists conduct beginner level training sessions relating to Phoenix. If there are sessions coming up you will hear about them in the staff news. You can always email the ITDS Service Desk to see if the HPC team has any training planned.

    Faculty / School training

    Some schools and faculties conduct In-house training sessions relating the HPC. In the past these sessions have seen researchers who have experience in using Phoenix demonstrate why and how they used Phoenix to process their research. This can be a great opportunity to talk with research colleagues about what you are planning and how you could best utilise Phoenix for your research output. To find opportunities like these, you will need to contact the head of research within your school or faculty.

    Intersect Third Party Training

    The University has partnered with Intersect to provide research support. A key feature of this partnership is the training sessions that are run onsite (or online due to Covid).

    Onsite training

    The Intersect eResearch Analyst runs training courses onsite at the University. Training courses have included; working with excel, programing with R: and Python in both beginner and advanced sessions. To view or book into an upcoming training session with intersect you can visit the Intersect Training Schedule.

    Online training

    In addition to the onsite training sessions, our partnership with Intersect has also provided us with the opportunity to complete some of their online training courses. Here is the link for Intersect-run courses.

    The courses range from introductory to advanced, and cover concepts from Data Collection, Management, and Analysis to Software, Programming, and Advanced Computing. For further information visit: https://intersect.org.au/training/courses/ 

    RONIN

    Ronin enables researchers to quickly and easily access the scale and flexibility of Amazon Web Services cloud computing platforms for e-research. There is a cost to researchers for using Ronin - please note, you may be eligible for a quota of up to US$330 per project per year. If your compute requirements exceed that amount, you will need to pay for the difference.

    You can learn more about RONIN on our RONIN wiki page or at https://ronin.cloud/. RONIN has a very useful blog that provides guides and support for using the application.

  • External Research Training

    Because there are broad research compute needs, here are some other places you can go to for well-designed HPC training. Some of these options provide free online training, others may have a cost involved.

    Pawsey 

    Pawsey was established in 2009 as part of the Commonwealth Government's Super Science initiative. Since then the Government has continued to provide funding to refresh their infrastructure and continue as a vital facility to National Science. As a result of this funding, Pawsey is selective on the types of research they accept on their infrastructure. For more information visit the Pawsey page. Pawsey has provided training for researchers interested in using their supercomputers, for access to this training visit: https://pawsey.org.au/supercomputing/training/  

    Classcentral

    Class Central is a search engine and reviews sites for online courses, with a focus primarily on free (or free to audit) courses from universities, offered through Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms. For further information visit: https://www.classcentral.com/course/udacity-high-performance-computing-1028 

    MOOC

    Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses that have been created by a variety of global providers and collated in the one learning platform. In the MOOC page you can search for courses such as; Data Science, Python or R: and find a range of courses that can support you in preparing and processing your research data. For HPC courses you may want to visit: https://www.mooc-list.com/tags/high-performance-computing 

    Intel

    Intels online training will provide a high-level introduction to HPC, the problem it solves and the vertical markets it solves it in. Rather than focusing on the step by step, this training will educate into the concepts and resources available to perform the data analytics process and even also discuss where accelerators can be used. To access the training visit:  https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/support/training/course/ointrohpc.html 

    Udacity

    Udacity aims to power careers through tech education. They partner with leading technology companies to learn how technology is transforming industries, and teach the critical tech skills that companies are looking for in their workforce. 

    The goal of this course is to give you solid foundations for developing, analyzing, and implementing parallel and locality-efficient algorithms. This course focuses on theoretical underpinnings. To give a practical feeling for how algorithms map to and behave on real systems, the course will supplement algorithmic theory with hands-on exercises on modern HPC systems, such as Cilk Plus or OpenMP on shared memory nodes, CUDA for graphics co-processors (GPUs), and MPI and PGAS models for distributed memory systems. To access this course, visit: https://www.udacity.com/course/high-performance-computing--ud281  

    AWS Educate

    AWS educate provides a range of training and learning guides. Although their training is focused on utilising the AWS compute platform, you may find some valuable compute knowledge.

    Jupyter Notebook

    Jupyter notebook is a community place where programmers can test out programming languages.