About Summer School

The Ontario Summer School on advanced research Computing 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 school provides attendees with the opportunity to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and advanced research computing on modern HPC platforms. The five full days three parallel streams summer school offers intensive courses on a number of selected subjects, including

  • Programming distributed systems using message passing (MPI);
  • Programming shared memory systems with threads (OpenMP);
  • Programming GPGPUs (CUDA);
  • Common programming languages: Modern Fortran, C/C++, R, Python, MATLAB/Octave etc.;
  • Visualization;
  • Data analytics and deep learning on advanced computing facilities;
  • Application tools.

Each site will have a slightly different list of courses. The summer school will include both in-class lectures and hands-on computer labs. Those who attend at least three full days cumulatively will receive an official certificate in HPC training (the exact rules can be site-specific). Prerequisites for this summer school vary depending on the sessions you choose, but all will require a basic familiarity with the Linux shell, and most will require a certain level of programming experience.

A long running event for SHARCNET, the week long summer school was introduced to the research community within SHARCNET institutions more than a decade ago, and is now an Ontario wide event taking place at three locations jointly organized by SHARCNET, SciNet and Centre for Advanced Computing. For a history of training events and summer schools, please follow the link Past Summer Schools on the left menu or visit the consortium websites.