Supercomputing made easy to digest on our “CSC Computing Environment” courses

We strive to achieve the best possible balance between comprehensiveness and approachability for our course. One of the most important recent improvements was splitting the course into two sections and adding sessions where we go through the exercises together. This allows for more time to focus on each topic both during the lectures and in the hands-on exercises. Our latest course got an average grade of 9.17, which we take as confirmation that we have been developing the course in the right direction.

If you have participated in our courses, the chances are that your valuable feedback has already helped us – but the more, the better! We kindly ask you to fill in our long term course benefits survey to help us deliver the best possible training also in the future.

The lectures were very clear, and a lot of the information was nicely explained and simplified in a way that’s easy to digest. The questions were answered very clearly and all the instructors were very eager to help.

Feedback from a course participant

We strongly believe that our course can benefit scholars of all backgrounds, and we are more than happy to collaborate with higher education institutes on the training they provide. Below are some possible avenues for collaboration:

• Our course material has the Creative Commons license, so it can be freely used and edited for other purposes (as long as it is done with the appropriate credits and the same license). The material is on GitHub, which encourages collaborative development.
• Our self-learning courses can be used as prerequisites and skill tests for more advanced courses. Students can simply check that they have the required skills, or complete the full course and provide the course certificate to their instructor.
• Institutes can build ensembles of our courses and offer them in their training portfolios. Teachers can simply check the certificates, or add some extra tasks and practical assignments, learning journals or live sessions. Our weekly research user support sessions can also function as contact points for the course participants to get help, ask and discuss course issues.

In addition to these, we would be happy to discuss other potential ways of using the course to support the needs of your students. Feel free to contact us at servicedesk(at)csc.fi!

Our future aims with these courses are high:

• Improve the overall high-performance computing skills and understanding of the Finnish research community
• Get the most out of existing computing resources, together
• Get to know each other: our specialists and researchers meet and discuss during the courses and in the weekly user support sessions

These are also the reasons why we offer these courses free of charge and online: it is important to us to this way provide equal opportunity to all researchers in Finland, in which ever phase of their career. The course does not require installing any additional software. The lecture materials on our eLena e-learning platform can be accessed with a regular Haka user account. The exercises are completed using the Puhti web interface. Setting up a CSC account and student project for accessing it is quick and easy. The course can also be completed independently by students.

• Prerequisite mini course
• CSC Computing Environment self-learning course
• Research Data Management self-learning course
• Elements of Supercomputing course
• Weekly research user support sessions
• Linux basics for CSC guide

Authors: Maria Lehtivaara and Mitja Sainio