HPC for Ag: Breaking the Compute Barrier, Upskilling Agri-Food Researchers to Utilize HPC Resources

Mondays, March 17–May 12, 10:30 a.m.–noon

Learn more and register

If you are a researcher that works in the agri-food domain (e.g., breeder, molecular biologist, food scientist, socioeconomist), you know a little bit of programming (e.g., in R and/or Python), but you feel a little limited (e.g., some of your calculations run for days on your laptop), then you could benefit from this course. We wish to show you how to step up to the next level, improve your coding efficiency, and make use of High Performance Computing (HPC) and Cloud resources readily available to you.

Familiarity at a beginner level with a programming language (e.g. Python, SQL, R, JavaScript, or Scala) is required. Given the nature of course material, some familiarity with the Python language is recommended.

This is a free, instructor-led course.

Outline

  • Intro to Cloud Computing
  • HPC Basics
    • UNIX Primer
    • Working remotely and scheduling jobs using SLURM
    • Syncing your work with the community
  • Expanding HPC Skills
    • Machine Learning Primer
    • Data leakage and Overtraining
  • Computer Science for the Agri-Food researcher
    • Algorithm design and data structures
    • Computational Complexity (Big-O) and profiling
  • HPC and Cloud Concepts
    • Divide and conquer
    • Parallelization
    • Containerization
    • Storage types
  • Computer Hardware and Resources
    • Processor types
    • Memory
    • Networking speed
  • Future trends