Training

Discovery Training

The Research Computing team provides free, online training sessions for Discovery users. The team also works to bring in vendors to provide free training, such as Globus, NVIDIA, and STATA.

Use the link below to view our Introduction to Discovery video training module. You’ll need to sign in using your Northeastern username and password to view the video. If you’re new to Discovery, we strongly recommend watching this introductory video. 

 

We will continue to add new online training modules through the year. If you are faculty and you are using Discovery with your class and would like us to develop or present a personalized training session for your class, please reach out to us at rc.northeastern.edu.

If you are a Discovery user and still need help after viewing the introductory video above, visit our Bookings page and select the appropriate service topic that you need assistance with. You can schedule as many consultations as needed. This is a free service available to Discovery users throughout the year. 

2022 Fall Training: Virtual Live Training Sessions

Please join us for our Fall Virtual Live Training sessions. All sessions are free to attend, but we do need you to click here to register for the RC Training Canvas course. Once enrolled, you can view previous training sessions and attend any virtual live training sessions. Please note, all sessions will be recorded and you will be able to view them at a later date if needed.

Starting Wednesday, October 5, we will have hands-on sessions on a variety of topics, as shown below.

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Session: Intro to Discovery

Course Description: Beginner level session for Discovery users to get started with computing on the cluster. This session includes an introduction to basic concepts of high performance computing including launching jobs interactively and in the background, accessing various partitions, monitoring the status of submitted jobs, and getting familiar with the cluster’s job scheduler, Slurm. This also includes hands-on exercises for getting started on Discovery.

Instructor: Joseph Cooke, PhD

Time:  10:30 AM – 11:45 AM

Friday, October 7, 2022

Session: Intro to OOD

Course Description: Beginner level session for Discovery users to learn the basics of Open On Demand and the tools available to them. 

Instructor: Joseph Cooke, PhD

Time:  10:30 AM – 11:45 AM

Session: Intro to GPUs

Course Description: Intermediate level session for Discovery users to familiarize themselves with utilizing various NVIDIA GPUs that are available to them on the cluster. The session includes various hands-on exercises to show how to launch jobs on the GPU partition with or without specific GPUs and running TensorFlow with GPU support on the cluster.  

Instructor: Shobana Sekar, PhD

Time:  1:00 PM – 2:15 PM 

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Session: Bioinformatics on Discovery

Course Description: Intermediate level session focused on running bioinformatics workflows on Discovery. We will cover some basic NGS workflows and hands-on exercises to demonstrate bioinformatics-specific job submission. 

Instructor: Shobana Sekar, PhD

Time:  9:00 AM – 10:15 AM

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Session: Intro to Linux and Shell Scripting

Course Description: Beginner to intermediate-level session for Discovery users to learn the basics of the Linux command line and scripting using the standard Linux command shell BASH

Instructor: Mariana Levi, PhD

Time:  11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

Session: Storage

Course Description: Understanding storage tiers at Research Computing, inside and outside of the HPC Cluster.

Instructor: Manasvita Joshi, PhD

Time:  1:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Friday, October 14, 2022

Session: Intro to Software Installation

Course Description: Beginner level session for users to learn about different ways to access/install software on Discovery, including the use of package managers (e.g., conda, spack) as well as installation from source. 

Instructor: Joseph Cooke, PhD

Time:  1:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Session: HPC & Parallel Computing

Course Description: Advanced-level session for Discovery users to learn about Parallel Computing (CPU-only) on Discovery. Includes introduction to HPC concepts, Parallelization approaches (shared memory, distributed memory, data parallel), Parallel computing libraries (OpenMP, MPI) and data-parallel example using Slurm job arrays.

Additional optional topics include: optimization approaches to run efficient parallel code, evaluating performance using advanced metrics: (speedup, efficiency and scaling tests), and Increasing MPI performance on the InfiniBand network.

Instructor: Mariana Levi, PhD

Time:  11:00 AM – 12:15 PM

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Session: Job Arrays

Course Description: Intermediate level session to introduce slurm job array and its various aspects. The session will explore setting up simple to intermediate-level job arrays on the cluster and will include multiple hands-on exercises and demos.

Instructor: Manasvita Joshi, PhD

Time:  1:00 PM – 2:15 PM

Let’s Work Together

Enabling you to advance your research is our mission. Reach out to us with questions, issues, and concerns so we can provide you with the assistance you need.