Workshops & Live Training

COVID-19 UPDATE

The Princeton Institute for Computational Science & Engineering (PICSciE), in collaboration with OIT Research Computing and other academic departments, will continue offering workshops and mini-courses this academic year. This fall, some workshops will be held in-person and others will be remote, but we may pivot to holding all sessions remotely if needed to comply with the University and State health and safety protocols.

We appreciate your patience and understanding during this unusual period as we strive to continue providing computing training to the Princeton community. If you have comments or questions, please email rcinfo@princeton.edu.

--The PICSciE Training Staff

Virtual Workshop Logistics

Please read the following information about virtual workshop logistics --- in particular the sections about technical prerequisites for hands-on workshops --- BEFORE registering.

Registration and Zoom links

As with in-person workshops, our virtual events still require registration at My PrincetonU. Only individuals with active Princeton NetIDs may register for and attend our remote workshops. A Zoom link will be sent to you with your registration.

If your plans change and you cannot attend, please cancel your registration at least 48 hours in advance! Sometimes significant technical and human resources need to be allocated to these workshops, and we need a reasonably accurate headcount in order to do that so that these events can run smoothly.

If a workshop has limited enrollment, please do not register unless you can attend the full workshop and participate actively! You will be taking a slot from someone more ready to profit from the event. Don't worry -- we re-offer the same workshops periodically, and we make most workshop materials available for offline consumption.

Prerequisites and Advance Setup

All of our virtual workshops require that participants use a Zoom account associated with an active Princeton NetID. Some also require that participants either be on a Princeton network (hard-line or eduroam wifi) or behind a VPN. This guide describes overarching prerequisites and setup instructions for virtual workshops.

In addition, many of our workshops have hands-on components that require that additional technical requirements be set up before a workshop begins. Any knowledge prerequisites or technical prerequisites are listed in each workshop's description, both on its Events entry here on the Research Computing website and on the registration page.

Please read a workshop's prerequisites carefully! For instance, a workshop description may mention that you need an Adroit account with SSH access or the ability to run Jupyter notebook on your local computer. The aforementioned guide offers instructions for setting up all these requirements, and you should read the sections of the guide appropriate to your workshop and follow the instructions therein at least 72 hours in advance of your workshop.

As a general rule, we offer no troubleshooting for technical setup issues (e.g. hardware/software setups, connecting to the Adroit training cluster, etc) at the workshops themselves! Doing so over Zoom is challenging and interruptive, not to mention demanding on our human resources. Therefore, be aware that if you do not set up a workshop's technical prerequisites well in advance, you may not be able to participate fully in its hands-on activities.

The Princeton Institute for Computational Science & Engineering (PICSciE) and OIT's Research Computing, in collaboration with campus partners and academic departments, is offering a series of instructor-led workshops either in-person or remote on programming and commonly-used research software tools. See Fall 2021 workshop poster.

Registration

Registration happens via the MyPrincetonU (My Campus Groups). Note that an active Princeton NetID is required to register for and to attend our sessions, as well as to view Zoom recordings. If you are a Princeton affiliate without a NetID, or if you are affiliated with a partner institution (e.g. PPPL or IAS), please email rcinfo@princeton.edu to see whether we can accommodate you.

Topics and schedule of workshops

The table below shows a complete listing of the Fall 2021 workshops in chronological order. Clicking on a workshop's title will take you to a course description and other event details for that workshop. Additional workshops may be added, so please check the schedule frequently.

Fall 2021 Workshops

Title	Needs advance setup?	Date(s)	Time(s)	Instructor
Intro to Data Analysis (using R)	Yes	Wed Sep 08	10:00 AM-12:00 PM	Oscar Torres-Reyna, Data & Statistics Consultant
Intro to the Linux Command Line (2 parts -- attend both parts)	Yes	Part 1 -- Wed Sep 08 Part 2 -- Thu Sep 09	4:00 pm - 6:30 pm 4:00 pm - 6:30 pm	Gabe Perez-Giz, Visiting Lecturer, PACM Lucas Sawade, Graduate Student, GEO Laura Leal, Graduate Student, ORFE
Introduction to Programming Using Python (four-part workshop -- attend all four parts)	Yes	Part 1 -- Mon Sep 13 Part 2 -- Wed Sep 15 Part 3 -- Mon Sep 20 Part 4 -- Wed Sep 22	4:30 PM-6:00 pm	Matthew Cahn, Programmer/Systems Admin, Molecular Biology
Getting Started with Research Computing Clusters	Yes	Tue Sep 14	12:30pm - 3:30pm	Carolina Roe-Raymond, Visualization Analyst Calla Chennault, Research Software Engineer
Introduction to Data Analysis (using Python)	Yes	Wed Sep 15	10:00am - 12:00 pm	Oscar Torres-Reyna, Data & Statistics Consultant
Creating and Running Software Containers with Docker and Singularity	Yes	Tue Sep 28	4:30 PM-6:00 pm	Jonathan Halverson, Research Software & Programming Analyst
Intro to Version Control Using Git	Yes	Part 1 -- Tue Oct 05 Part 2 -- Thu Oct 07	4:00 PM-6:30 pm	Dev Dabke, Graduate Student, PACM
How to Make Effective Plots	Yes	Wed Oct 06	10:00-11:30 am	Carolina Roe-Raymond, Visualization Analyst
Removing the Tedium from Your Research Workflow	Yes	Wed Oct 06	4:30 PM-6:00 pm	Jonathan Halverson, Research Software & Programming Analyst
FALL BREAK: INTRO TO PARALLEL PROGRAMMING FOR HPC (VIRTUAL WORKSHOP)
What Every Computational Researcher Should Know About Computer Architecture	Yes	Mon Oct 18	10:30 AM-12:00 pm	Stephane Ethier
Performance and Vectorization (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 18	10:30 - 12:00	Bei Wang
A Primer on Parallel Programming		Mon Oct 18	1:00 - 3:00	Garrett Wright
Introduction to OpenMP (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 19	9:00 - 10:45	Tim Mattson, Intel
Working with Threads (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 19	12:00 - 1:30	Tim Mattson, Intel
The OpenMP Data Environment (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 19	1:45 - 3:15	Tim Mattson, Intel
Tasks & Advanced Topics (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 19	3:30 - 5:00	Tim Mattson, Intel
Parallel Programming: Intro to MPI (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 20	10:00 - 12:30	Ian Cosden
What is a GPU?		Mon Oct 20	1:00 - 1:30	Stephane Ethier
Introduction to CuPy and Numba		Mon Oct 20	1:30 - 2:15	Henry Schreiner
GPU Libraries (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 20	2:15 - 2:45	Jonathan Halverson
Introduction to OpenACC (Hands-on)		Mon Oct 20	3:00 - 4:30	Stephane Ethier
A Primer on CUDA		Mon Oct 20	4:30 - 5:00	Stephane Ethier
FALL 2021 WORKSHOPS
Machine Learning for Your Research	No	Wed Oct 27	4:30 PM-6:00 pm	Savannah Thais, Associate Research Scholar, IRIS-HEP
Introduction to R Graphics Package: ggplot2	Yes	Thu Nov 04	10:00am - 12:00 pm	Dawn Koffman, Statistical Programmer, OPR
Leveraging the NVIDIA A100 GPU for AI and HPC	Yes	Tue Nov 09	4:30 PM-6:00 pm	Jonathan Halverson, Research Software & Programming Analyst
Intro to Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)	Yes	Wed Nov 10	2:30pm - 4:00 pm	Bei Wang, Senior Research Software Engineer
Scientific Visualization	Yes	Tue Nov 16	2:00pm - 3:30 pm	Eliot Feibush, Visualization Scientist
Mixing Python and Compiled Code	Yes	Tue Nov 16	4:30-6:30 pm	Henry Schreiner, Computational Physicist / Research Software Engineer
Continuous Integration and Automated Software Testing	Yes	Tue Nov 30	1:30-3:00 pm	David Luet, Senior Software & Programming Analyst
Secure Research at Princeton: Social Science	Yes	Thu Dec 02	4:00-5:30 pm	Several Presenters

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

The Maps and Geospatial Information Center (MAGIC), associated with the Princeton University Library, offers a variety of instructor-led virtual workshops on using QGIS and ArcGIS Pro. Please see the training sessions here.

Prerequisites and Advance Setup

Many of our workshops have knowledge prerequisites and/or require advance setup of hardware or software. Please read the workshop descriptions carefully and make sure you have satisfied any requirements well in advance. A guide to help with advance setup for in-person workshops can be found on our workshop requirements page.

An analogous guide for virtual workshops, which includes a list of overarching requirements for any workshop conducted over Zoom, can be found on our virtual workshop requirements page. Please note that, because of the logistical challenges it entails, there will be no troubleshooting of setup issues during the virtual workshops!

Recordings and workshop materials

Workshop materials will be made available sometime at the end of the semester via the menu at left (visit "Archives of past workshops", where there will eventually be a link titled "Fall 2021 Workshop Materials"). Note that sometimes instructors of virtual workshops request that their sessions not be recorded, so Zoom recordings of some sessions may not become available.

Pre-recorded Virtual Workshops

PICSciE has also archived recordings and presentation materials on a broader range of topics related to research computing. Although not as useful as participating in real-time instructor-led training, researchers and staff may find these materials useful as self-paced training, or as a reference to peruse before or after attending "live" sessions (whether in-person or virtual).

Fall 2020 Workshops -- archives of our Fall 2020 Zoom workshops. Note that not all sessions were recorded.
Winter 2021 Bootcamp -- PICSciE, in conjunction with CSML, also offered intensive two-week training on a range of beginning to advanced computing topics during January 2021. A catalog of those sessions, including presentation materials and recordings (when available), can be found on the Winter 2021 Research Computing Bootcamp website.
Spring 2021 Workshops -- archives of our Spring 2021 Zoom workshops. Note that not all sessions were recorded.