SciComp Kickstart - 2023 plans and yearly strategy
It’s time for our “kickstart course” - let’s talk about what that is, why, and why you might want to attend.
The full name is “Introduction to scientific computing and HPC” (high-performance computing), and it used to be called “HPC Kickstart” and was taught without the first day, thus the short name “kickstart” we still use. Some years day 1 had a different name, but was still taught together with days 2-3 as a package.
Our goal isn’t just to teach some skills, but to form a community around scientific computing - with researchers who have a common language to work together and help each other, supported by Aalto Scientific Computing in the background.
Topics of SciComp Kickstart
Day 1 is not about high-performance computing things, but the basic skills needed to do scientific computing: things like Linux usage, data management, the types of tools available for different problems. For almost anyone doing any kind of programming/scientific computing kind of work, regardless of background. These kind of skills aren’t taught in academic degree programs. We teach these on day 1 because otherwise, new researchers have to learn from each other or re-invent.
Days 2 and 3 are about high-performance computing, more precisely basic cluster usage (with a focus of the basics). This is focused on the kinds of tools our community usually uses.
The topics are refined after many years of both teaching and support of junior researchers. Because of the way academic careers work (much diversity of paths), these topics (even day 1) aren’t just for new researchers but everyone can find something to learn or brush up on.
Yearly schedule
For the past years, we have been trying to keep up this yearly summer schedule. This usually happens the first full workweek:
Monday: HR introductions, other formalities for new summer workers - many departments seem to something like this. This may happen early than Monday of the kickstart week, since sometimes that comes too late.
Tuesday afternoon: Kickstart course day 1, the general scientific computing introduction. Applicable to everyone doing scientific computing.
Wednesday-Thursday afternoons: The HPC cluster usage part, which fewer people will attend compared to Tuesday.
Friday: we don’t have scheduled programs on Fridays, but sometimes there are communities who host advanced tutorials here about what their local users need. In 2023, there is at least an advanced GPU course then.
This year’s scheduling conflict
We are aware that there is a scheduling conflict with the CS summer day which is scheduled on the Tuesday of the 2023 HPC kickstart course. We did contact every department in January/February, yet this was still a surprise to us. In past years, we have adjusted our schedule to similar events, but this is not possible this year despite our best efforts.
We will still try to support researchers as much as possible. Recordings of previous years are available on youtube, and we also release videos the same evening as the course precisely to support everyone regardless of these conflicts. Researchers can still join us for day 2 and 3 even if you did not join day 1. However, please pay particular care to the instructions about setting up the Triton connection in advance.
Future
We hope that this blog post can explain our goals to a larger audience so that we can reach even more people in the future, so that we can expand to onboarding even more young researchers even more systematically. You can reach us at scip@aalto.fi, and each spring we reach out to the main departments to schedule each summer’s course.