Bringing CSC services closer to students through training collaboration
At CSC, we’re committed to supporting Finnish higher education institutions and research institutes by offering powerful computing and data management services, free of charge for academic use. One of the best ways to raise awareness of these resources is by collaborating on training activities that introduce students to our services early in their academic journey and they can then smoothly continue using our services on research.
Each year, we organize around 70 training sessions, both onsite and online. To better meet user needs, we’ve also launched self-learning courses, which have been well-received. Recently, we’ve taken our first steps into deeper training collaboration with universities and universities of applied sciences.
Training collaboration initiatives
One great example is our partnership with Manne Hannula at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (Oamk). He has crafted a course package using a combination of our online materials and his own assignments. The course has already run twice, attracting about 40 students each time. Hannula shares: “When we learned about the supercomputers, our smiles grew bigger, as we got access to CSC’s Puhti and Mahti supercomputers and their thousands of cores and terabytes! All this within only a few ssh and sbatch commands!”
Another example comes from the University of Helsinki’s Master’s Programme in Theoretical and Computational Methods, where CSC courses are being integrated directly into the course portfolio, making it even easier for students to find relevant training.
Integration with university teaching schemes is also being pursued in collaboration with Aalto University. Recently the CSC-driven Practical Deep Learning course was delivered at the Aalto campus, attracting a total of 57 on-site and online participants.
Plans for corresponding courses are currently being drawn up with Arcada University of Applied Science. Further to directly benefiting students seeking to gain experience of deep learning workflows and CSC supercomputers, the initiatives with Aalto and Arcada contribute toward the wider LUMI AI Factory teaching and training goals.
We’re also inspired by the “satellite learning” concept, used successfully in CodeRefinery courses. We hope to apply the same model to our “CSC Computing Environment” course. The idea is simple: local teachers host an in-person classroom while connecting with our CSC specialists via Zoom for support during online sessions.
Tailored training is another way we collaborate. For example, Joona Tolonen delivered a Linux course at the University of Helsinki this spring, and Juha Lento joined Aalto University’s “Intro to Scientific Computing” course with a guest lecture on CSC resources. These collaborations are always welcome but require separate agreements depending on our available staff.
Open course materials and support services
All our course materials and self-learning resources are freely available. We also offer support services such as Noppe notebooks for hosting course environments, and Pouta and Rahti cloud services for running virtual machines and containers for course environments.
We’re excited to continue building these collaborations across Finland. If you’re interested in working with us, please contact Atte Sillanpää — we’d love to hear from you!
Authors: Maria Lehtivaara, Atte Sillanpää, Samantha Wittke, Joona Tolonen, Leopekka Saraste, Tuomas Rossi and Jesse Harrison.
Photo: Adobe Stock.
Atte Sillanpää
Atte Sillanpää promotes the usage of CSC computing capacity for research through direct support, documentation and software installations.