Summer Schools

FAQ

Do I need to have an Alliance account to register for Compute Ontario summer school courses?

The vast majority of our courses do not have such a requirement. The courses which do require this list this as a formal course prerequisite. For the rest of the courses you can create a Compute Ontario Training account, then use it to register for the courses you want.

I can login to the CCDB website using Alliance account, but the account doesn't work when I try to register for summer school courses - why?

When you login to the CCDB website, make sure you check the status of your account - most likely it is Deactivated. For almost all of our courses you can create a Compute Ontario Training account, then use it to register for the courses you want.

The course is full - do you have a waitlist? or can you register me manually?

Our summer school courses do not have waitlists. Also, once the course is full, we cannot add people manually. What you can do is to wait till the summer school is over, then send us an email (help@sharcnet.ca) asking for an access to the course contents including the recordings from the live sessions.

Do I need to be from Ontario to be able to attend Compute Ontario summer school courses?

No. Any Canadian researcher can register for our summer school courses. This applies to Canadian grad students, some undergrads (involved in research), postdocs, staff researchers, faculty etc. You can be in a Canadian university, college, national lab etc. The school is named so because it is organized by Compute Ontario and affiliated Canadian HPC consortia - SHARCNET, SciNet, CAC.

I am a high school student - can I attend the Compute Ontario summer school?

No. The school's material is designed for researchers, and will not be helpful for high schoolers.

Overview

Ontario Summer School on Advanced Research Computing (ARC) 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 schools provide attendees with the opportunity to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing on modern HPC platforms. Five full days dual/triple stream summer schools offer intensive courses on a number of selected subjects, including

• Programming distributed systems using message passing (MPI);
• Programming shared memory systems with threads (e.g. OpenMP);
• Programming GPGPUs (CUDA);
• Common programming languages: Modern Fortran, C/C++, R, Python, MATLAB/Octave etc.;
• Debugging;
• Visualization;
• Cloud computing;
• Big data and deep learning;
• Domain specific tools.

Each site has a slightly different list of courses. Every year the curricula change to reflect the current HPC trends and ever changing needs of the Advanced Research Computing community. The summer schools include both in-class lectures and hands-on computer labs. Those who attend at least three full days cumulatively receive an official certificate in ARC training (the exact rules are site-specific). Prerequisites vary depending on the sessions you choose, but all require a basic familiarity with the Linux shell, and most 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 was offered by SHARCNET since 2007, and was expanded to three provincial offerings (West, Central, and East) in 2011. Originally structured as a four-day workshop, Summer School evolved to become a week-long event of intensive courses and hands-on labs ran in two or more parallel streams.

Summer School 2024

UPDATE: Registration opens on May 15, 2024, at 2pm EDT. Space is limited, so hurry up! You can register here: https://training.computeontario.ca/coss2024.php

We are excited to announce the dates for this year’s 2024 Compute Ontario Summer School.

Jointly organized by the Centre for Advanced Computing, SciNet, SHARCNET, and in collaboration with the RDM Network of Experts, this year’s virtual event will be held on June 3-21.

The Compute Ontario Summer School offers a comprehensive curriculum packed with around 40 free courses. Delivered by experts in the field, these sessions cover a wide range of topics including Advanced Research Computing (ARC), High Performance Computing (HPC), and Research Data Management (RDM). With presentations and workshops available at introductory to advanced levels, there is something for everyone.

Registration is expected to open in mid-May. Stay tuned for more updates!

Curricula

• Courses taught in the past SHARCNET Summer Schools

Past schools

• 2023 (Online)
• 2022 (Online)
• 2021 (Online)
• 2020 (Online)
• 2019 (McMaster, UofT, Ottawa)
• 2018 (Western, UofT, Queen's)
• 2017 (Waterloo, UofT, Queen's)
• 2016 (McMaster, UofT, Ottawa)
• 2015 (Western, UofT, Queen's)
• 2014 (Waterloo, UofT, Carleton)
• 2013 (Western, UofT)
• 2012 (Western, UofT, Ottawa)
• 2011 (Sheridan, UofT)
• 2010 (Sheridan)
• 2009 (Sheridan)
• 2008 (York)
• 2007 (McMaster)
• 2006 (Waterloo)
• 2005 (York)
• 2004 (Wilfrid Laurier)
• 2003 (Western)
• 2002 (McMaster)