High Performance Computing and Big Data

In this course, researchers and engineers can learn about high performance computing, discuss their specific problems with experts and start to solve them on SURFsara’s state-of-the-art computing facilities.

Date:  2 January – 2 February 2018

Researchers and engineers from industry and academia alike frequently experience their daily work to be impeded by physical limitations of their ICT equipment: processing and storage capacity, visualization facilities and their integration. They feel that upscaling to high performance computing (HPC) facilities would be very beneficial to their work, but don’t know how to do this and lack the time to investigate their options.

From January 2nd until Feb 2nd 2018, researchers from the University of Amsterdam and high performance computing experts from the SURFsara national Super Computing Center organize a course on ‘High Performance Computing and Big Data’, where researchers and engineers can learn about HPC, discuss their specific problems with experts and start to solve them on SURFsara’s state-of-the-art computing facilities.

Objective: The objective of this course is to introduce individuals with limited programming knowledge to various HPC facilities. At the end of the course, they will be able to use them avoiding common pitfalls, thus saving them money and time.

Modules: The course is taught in English and is composed of a number of independent modules touching on various HPC and Big Data issues:

  • Introduction to Unix, distributed systems, and Big Data
  • Using state-of-the-art Super Computers (with hands-on on the National Super Computer Cartesius and the Lisa cluster)
  • HPC Cloud
  • GPU programming
  • Local and Remote Visualization Techniques
  • Data management
  • Data Intensive Computing with Hadoop: MapReduce and Pig
  • MPI/OpenMP approaches used in HPC and distributed computing

Course website: https://www.surf.nl/en/agenda/2018/01/high-performance-computing-and-big-data/index.html