re-posted from the SciNet blog
Most would associate summertime with a relaxing and leisurely season of the year. However, HPC centres like SciNet, as in many others around the world, perceive this differently and are actually quite busy during this period.
Among the many activities SciNet carries out during the summer “break” are workshops and short courses. These activities are scheduled in the summer to fit between the term-long courses that SciNet offers to graduate students at the University of Toronto.
In particular, one of SciNet’s oldest training activities is a one-week intensive school on high-performance and technical computing. This annual summer school is our flagship training event, and is aimed at graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, researchers and occasionally even faculty members, who are engaged in compute intensive research. SciNet’s first such summer school was given in 2009, at which time it was called a “Parallel Scientific Computing” workshop. This first version of the school was heavily focused on parallel programming and applications in astrophysics.

These days, SciNet’s summer school is part of the Compute Ontario Summer School on Scientific and High Performance Computing. Held geographically in the west, centre and east of the province of Ontario in Canada, the summer school provides attendees with the opportunity to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing on modern HPC platforms. The central edition is the continuation of the SciNet summer school.
Not only is the school organized in a wider context, its program has expanded as well. In the last three years, the Toronto edition has had three streams with a wide variety of topics, from shell programming to data science, machine learning and neural networks, biomedical computing, and, still, parallel programming.
The type of training offered at the summer school is very practical, with a lot of hands-on exercises and live coding. This practical approach is very typical for most of SciNet’s courses but takes its ultimate form during the summer school instruction.

In addition to the training that participants received, the school also offers the opportunity of participants to interact with other participants, as well as the instructors, exchange ideas or discuss about current problems they are trying to solve. In fact, since a couple of years, the program includes focused sessions such as “Bring your own code” and “Bio-Hacking”, where this sort of interactions are not only promoted but the main theme.
Our summer school has the add-on feature of being absolutely free of charge for participants! That’s something we believe is quite important for several reasons, but mostly because we believe that in this way we can reach more researchers from fields that are relatively new to doing computational research.
This type of event not only benefits the students and participants of the summer school, but also enables collaborations between departments and consortia, as part of the training was delivered in partnership with colleagues from SHARCNET and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
For more information about the summer school, please visit the original blog post on the SciNet website.