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 2020

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 SHARCNET Summer School on ARC will be delivered online. It will start on May 19, and will run as a single stream until mid-June. Registration will open on May 5. Registration is limited, so please register early. If there is enough demand, we might re-run some courses for the second time later in the summer.

Register here for the 2020 SHARCNET Summer School on ARC