OSC Courses & Training

Courses & Training

OSC runs a series of training to enable researchers and other members of staff  to learn about the High Performance Computing facilities available to members of Oxford University.

OSC courses are hands-on, free of charge and open to all staff and students. They are highly rated by participants and fill up very quickly - so book early!

Also see our notices of external HPC training courses.

January 2012 Courses - Latest Dates

The next set of courses will run in Trinity Term -  Please use the online booking form to secure a place.

Venue & timings - All courses are in the Access Grid Room at the Oxford e-Research Centre, 7 Keble Road. See individual courses for timings.

Course 1: Introduction to Supercomputing at Oxford Training Day

Thursday 26/01/2012 from 10:00-16:00

In this single session we will cover:

- An introduction to Parallel Computing & HPC

- Using OSC and the Oxford systems (access, charging etc)

- Aspects of Linux for HPC

- Job submission with PBS, Torque & GOLD

Course 2: Introduction to MPI and OPENMP - Numerically intensive computing:

Part 1 Thursday 2/2/2012 from 09:00-12:00

Part 2 Thursday 9/2/2012 from 09:00-12:00

Please note These courses will require you to use your own laptop to connect to the University network. WINDOWS users will also need to download and set up a small piece of software called PUTTY to connect to the OSC systems. Assistance will be available at the sessions if you require help getting connected. Further guidance is available to get you up and running before the course.

Course 1: Introduction to Supercomputing at Oxford Training Day

You are invited to a general introduction to our facilities provided as a central University resource open to all researchers.  Why might you be interested?

Does any of your research meet any of the following criteria?

•  Do you deal with large amounts of unstructured data?

• Could a quick analysis of your data could really revolutionise your work?

• You would love to be able to analyse data sets an order of magnitude larger than ever before

• You think that you might benefit from high performance computing but don’t know how to start.

• Do you currently run analyses on your desktop computer that take a very long time?

• You don’t have time to think about how to best use computational facilities

• You spend far too much time fiddling around with software programmes?

This session is open and relevant to all disciplines – physical and life sciences, engineering, arts, humanities and social sciences. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know much about computers, super or otherwise.

There will be time during the session to allow you to set up your laptop to connect to the University network, install PUTTY and test your connection to the OSC systems.

The course will also cover aspects of Linux for HPC

This session walks through the features of Linux which are most valuable to OSC users including:

• How to log on and copy files to/from a Linux system
• Why use a command line?
• The concept of a "shell"
• Your Linux "environment" settings
• Files, directories and permissions
• How to edit and save a simple text file
• How to create a simple shell script
• Redirection of input and output

Job submission with PBS, Torque & GOLD

We will cover PBS job submission scripts and the OSC’s GOLD accounting software.