Digital research tools can help today’s researchers meet ambitious goals and overcome significant challenges, such as

• Mining and analyzing a large data set
• Modelling that is too complex for desktop computing
• Identifying patterns or trends in spatial data or visual imagery
• Developing a web-based research/analysis tool

In this session, equip yourself with basic terms and concepts related to high performance (HPC), supercomputing and big data analytics, and an understanding of the computing power and expert support available to you through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and ACENET. Learn how advanced computing is already serving researchers across the sciences, and how you can get started.

Are you interested in learning more about digital research methods, but don't know where to start? Do you have large data sets that you would like to mine and analyze in innovative ways? Do you want to look for patterns in visual imagery, reveal trends in spatial data, or perform quantitative analysis of digitized texts? Perhaps you want to build a web-based research or analytical tool and don’t know where to start. This orientation session introduces you to the ACENET organization and the research supports and resources available through ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada that are directly applicable for humanities and social sciences researchers.

Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Humanities Commons, ORCID: where is  it worth spending your time on online platforms? This workshop considers how to create and manage a professional online presence, with a focus on humanities and social sciences. We talk about choosing platforms and social media based on ethics, audience, features, and, yes, the amount of work they involve. As William Shakespeare once said, “to blog, or not to blog, that is the question.”

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Most of us have experience using a computer, whether for school, work, or entertainment, but how many of us have actually had an expert teach us how to use it? When one of your computing devices goes wrong, do you struggle to understand why? Perhaps you do an internet search in the hope that someone else who has had the exact same problem as you found a solution that also works for you.

It doesn't need to be (quite) this way. This talk doesn't teach you how to troubleshoot everything, but does give you insight to how media, programs and data are encoded and used by computers so you can make more sense of why computers behave the ways they do and solve some of your problems with greater efficiency and less frustration. We provide an approachable overview of how a computer works, by both looking at their history and breaking one down to explain individual components, before highlighting some of the tradeoffs to consider when buying a computer. We provide practical, simple, and actionable advice on digital security and show you a few "pro tips" on how to make the most of your workstation, phone, or whatever device you happen to use. 

Whether you have a lot or a little experience using your digital technology, if you want to learn how to use your devices more effectively, this workshop is for you!

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This core session is designed to help new users at ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada get up and running.

What is high performance computing (HPC) and what can it do for me? How can ACENET help?

Researchers across many disciplines use HPC to tackle analyses that would be either inefficient or impossible on a desktop.

This session offers:

• a basic description of the infrastructure and support accessible through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) and ACENET, with entry-level advice about how to begin.
• an overview of the software packages available through the Alliance and ACENET for applications, data analysis, software development and compiling code, as well as the process of requesting specific software relevant to your work.
• insight into the potential of parallel computing to accelerate your analysis.

This session is designed for those with no prior experience in HPC, and are looking for an introduction and overview.

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This session involves practical exercises.

This core session is designed to help new users at ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada get up and running.

Linux is the terminal interface used to enable you to use the ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) HPC clusters from your desktop. It's the tool you need to get your data on the clusters, run your programs, and get your data back. In this session, learn how to get started with Linux and how to perform some basic tasks:

• create and navigate directories for your data
• load files
• manage your storage
• run programs on the computing clusters
• set file permissions 

This workshop is designed for those with no prior experience in working with a terminal interface.

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YouTube Tutorial: (Video)

This session involves practical exercises.

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YouTube Tutorial: (Video) 

This session involves practical exercises.

This core session is designed to help new users at ACENET and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada get up and running.

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada's national systems use the job scheduler called “Slurm”. This session is for users who have had no experience with using Slurm, are transitioning to Slurm, or are seeking to improve efficiency with Slurm. You will learn how Slurm works and how it allocates jobs, enabling you to:

• minimize wait time by framing reasonable requests
• optimize use of the resources to achieve efficiency
• increase throughput
• run more jobs simultaneously
• troubleshoot and address crashes

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This workshop involves practical exercises.

Software Carpentry teaches basic computational research skills. Using Software Carpentry materials, this hands-on workshop introduces you to the fundamentals of the Unix Shell, Version Control and Python. 

The workshop covers the fundamentals of Python, including data types, conditional statements, loops and functions, as well as program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own projects. The goal is to teach the practical knowledge needed to start programming, debugging and using Python in everyday tasks.

Of interest to: active computational researchers and their teams; companies using computational tools for R&D; anyone considering a research project that requires computational research; and students eager to enhance their career choices by expanding their skill set.

This workshop involves practical exercises.

Software Carpentry teaches basic computational research skills. Using software-carpentry.org materials this hands-on workshop introduces you to the fundamentals of the Unix Shell, Version Control with Git and R.

This hands-on workshop covers the fundamentals of R, including data types, conditional statements, loops and functions, as well as program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants are encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own projects. The goal is to teach the practical knowledge needed to start programming, debugging and using R in everyday tasks.

Of interest to: active computational researchers and their teams; companies using computational tools for R&D; anyone considering a research project that requires computational research; and students eager to enhance their career choices by expanding their skill set.

This workshop involves practical exercises.

Software Carpentry teaches basic computational research skills. Using software-carpentry.org materials this workshop introduces you to the fundamentals of MATLAB.

This is a beginner level workshop that is hands-on, covering the fundamentals of MATLAB, including data types, conditional statements, loops and functions, as well as program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants are encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems. The goal is to teach the practical knowledge needed to start programming, debugging and using MATLAB in everyday tasks.

Of interest to: active computational researchers and their teams; companies using computational tools for R&D; anyone considering a research project that requires computational research; and students eager to enhance their career choices by expanding their skill set.

This session involves practical exercises

This is an introductory workshop for researchers and students who are interested in programming basics for humanities and social sciences applications. No prior experience in programming is necessary. Topics covered include an introduction to Unix Shell and Linux, websites and versioning with Git, regular expressions, Python for humanities and web scraping with Python. Applications include web scraping, survey field restriction, websites and text analysis. The workshop uses software-carpentry.org materials.

This workshop introduces you to the basic techniques for collecting information from social media sites and the web in general. We cover Twitter, Facebook, and general web pages. We spend most of our time looking at Twitter, but the basics of collecting information from Facebook is also introduced, and we talk generally about a few methods for collecting from web pages. Working examples are shared throughout that you can take and use (almost) immediately. Prior programming experience is neither needed nor expected. The final 30 minutes is used for open consultation about any scraping projects you are currently engaged in, planning, or just starting to think about.

Introductory Python for Ecologists is presented jointly by ACENET and the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN). Over multiple days, it explores data analysis and visualization with Python, based on the Data Carpentry Lessons. Each session builds on the last.

The series starts with basic Python syntax and the Jupyter notebook interface. It then moves to importing CSV files using the Pandas package to manipulate and summarize data frames, and covers a brief introduction to plotting. Finally, it demonstrates how to work with databases directly from Python.

No previous coding experience is necessary.

The Introductory R for Ecologists workshop series is presented jointly by ACENET and the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN). Over multiple days, it explores data analysis and visualization with R, based on the Data Carpentry Lessons. Each session builds on the last.

The series begins with basic R syntax and the R Studio notebook interface. It then moves to importing CSV files, the structure of data frames, how to deal with factors, how to add/remove rows and columns, how to calculate summary statistics from a data frame, and a brief introduction to plotting. Finally, it demonstrates how to work with databases directly from R.

No previous coding experience is necessary.

This session provides an introduction to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada cloud which is used to create and manage virtual machines. Virtual machines allow great flexibility but require knowledge and effort to configure them for your specific needs. Virtual machines can be used for diverse work flows, from processing particle physics data to running humanities and social sciences websites. Learn how to create a virtual machine and how to start using it.

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In this session, we give an overview of what a cloud is generally, as well as the Digital Research Alliance of Canada cloud specifically. To demonstrate what may be accomplished with a cloud, different cloud usage cases for the humanities and social sciences are presented followed by a discussion of two common methods for website generation, a common use for the cloud. We finish with a brief discussion of server security and the implications it has for the two methods presented for creating websites.

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This is an intermediate level series. Cloud computing provides great flexibility, allowing complete control of the computing environment. In addition, the environment can be copied, backed up, created and recreated in an automated way. In these lessons, we start you on the path towards making use of the great flexibility and power of cloud computing. We use the popular static website generator Jekyll. This is an in-depth workshop for those with no prior cloud experience, at the end of which you have a virtual machine and a Jekyll website.

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This is a beginner to intermediate level session. Learn the best practices at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada for minimizing your risk for cyber attacks. Topics include SSH security, firewalls, using logs and creating backups; all applied to running and maintaining cloud projects at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

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This session explores what sensitive data are, the different levels of data sensitivity, addresses sensitive data management, ethical handling, cybersecurity considerations, and resources for dealing with sensitive data in Atlantic Canada. We also provide you with a customizable toolkit to help you manage and maintain your data ethically and responsibly. Discussion is encouraged about your own experiences, considerations, frustrations and solutions.

This is an introductory workshop to research data management for Humanists and Social Scientists. The Tri-Agencies, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), require that researchers make their data openly available to the public. What does this mean for Humanists and Social Scientists that don’t work with traditional “data” and instead work with humans, books, or art? The session focuses on the importance of data management planning. Specifically, it covers the tools and services available to Atlantic Canadian researchers that can help you better manage your data, enhance the discoverability of your research, and ensure that your valuable research data are preserved for future reuse. Special attention is also be given to managing sensitive data, including FRDR’s Sensitive Data Pilot Project. This session is co-facilitated by a data librarian to foster a discussion of the role of research data management in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

This workshop involves practical exercises.

This is an introductory workshop to teach core data skills for efficient, shareable, and reproducible research practices covering the early stages of the lifecycle of data-driven research and projects. Through a two-day hands-on approach, the focus is on the introductory computational skills needed for data organization and analysis. This workshop is domain-specific, focusing on examples and challenges from Humanities and Social Sciences research fields. The workshop uses data-carpentry.org materials.

This is an introductory lesson adapted from the Library Carpentry workshop on Introduction to working with Data that introduces people with library- and information-related roles, or those in the Humanities and Social Sciences professions that work with data, to using regular expressions. Regular expressions are a concept and an implementation used in many different programming environments for sophisticated pattern matching. They are an incredibly powerful tool that can amplify your capacity to find, manage, and transform data and files. The lesson provides background on the regular expression language and how it can be used to match and extract text and to clean data. No previous experience with programming is required.

This is a hands-on introductory workshop focused on fostering best practices for data organization in spreadsheets. Participants learn how to organize their data to prioritize clarity, reproducibility, and interoperability, such that they can seamlessly load their data later into an analysis program. The spreadsheet programs covered are Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. The examples explored are from the field of Social Sciences, but the principles are relevant for any discipline that collects data in spreadsheets. No previous experience with spreadsheets or programming is required.

This Library Carpentry adapted lesson introduces people working in Humanities, Social Sciences, and library- and information-related roles to working with data in OpenRefine. OpenRefine can be used to standardize and clean data across your file, and is most useful when working with a comma separated values file (csv) or a tab delimited file (tsv). It can help you get an overview of a data set, resolve inconsistencies in a data set, help you split data up into more granular parts, and more. At the conclusion of the lesson you will understand what the OpenRefine software does and how to use the OpenRefine software to work with data files. This lesson is co-facilitated by an academic librarian who provides real life examples of using OpenRefine in their work. No previous experience with the software is required.

Join the ACENET cybersecurity team for a session that tackles the basics of information security. Topics include a discussion of the social and psychological aspects of avoiding common attacks. Safe browsing, file sharing, video conferencing, and tools for online collaboration are all covered in a discussion of how to stay safe while living and working on the internet. Email security, passwords and password management, encryption basics, and best practices for securing the home/office environment are addressed. Bring your own questions and concerns.

This is a beginner to intermediate level session. Learn the best practices at Compute Canada for minimizing your risk for cyber attacks. Topics include SSH security, firewalls, using logs and creating backups; all applied to running and maintaining cloud projects at Compute Canada.

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A key concept in software engineering for decades, version control is integral to effective management and manipulation of evolving work in a digital environment. You may have heard of Git, but there are many competing version control tools available, and they all exist in a large “ecosystem” of related web services. Learn how to assess your options and choose a combination of version control tools and services for your work.

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Version control is the practice of managing and sharing changes to documents, programming code, websites or any other files to keep track of what’s been changed, by whom, when and why. All previous versions of files are saved and you can even revert to a previous version. Git is a version control software.

Git-portal sites, like GitHub or GitLab, offer many useful features to facilitate collaborative development.

This beginner level session introduces you to Git. We show you how to create a repository, record changes to files, explore and restore from the recorded history and how to resolve conflicts (when one member overwrites another’s changes).

Lesson Material: http://github-pages.ucl.ac.uk/git-novice/

Version control is the practice of managing and sharing changes to documents, programming code, websites or any other files to keep track of what’s been changed, by whom, when and why. All previous versions of files are saved and you can even revert to a previous version. Git is a version control software.

Git-portal sites, like GitHub or GitLab, offer many useful features to facilitate collaborative development.

This session focuses on collaborative development workflows using Git-collaboration sites like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket and demonstrates how to work with branches, issue tracking, contribute to projects using pull-/merge-requests, code-review, how to run CI/CD-pipelines and use other common features of these platforms.

Lesson Material: https://acenet-arc.github.io/git-collaboration/

Designed to serve anyone considering a project that involves complex analysis, and/or a large data set, of special interest to researchers working in the humanities and natural sciences, eager to explore new possibilities.

This short introduction to data management and analysis tools helps you consider your data, and understand which aspects of the Big Data Ecosystem pertain to your research. Data analysis has been around for a long time – but today’s researchers manipulate an unprecedented variety and volume of data from myriad sources, and use advanced computing for high velocity processing.

It’s no surprise that diverse data sources (e.g., GPS coordinates, videos from mobile devices, and massive on-line archives of digitized manuscripts etc.) require strategic approaches to management and analysis. This seminar helps you choose an approach that fits your data.

When working with large sets of numbers, it is often more useful to display the information graphically using histograms, scatter plots, bar charts, box plots and other depictions.

This workshop teaches participants how to gain insights into data through visualization using R as the programming language.  Basic knowledge of R is recommended, although not mandatory.

Participants learn how to:

• Create simple scatterplots, histograms, and box plots
• Compare the plotting features of base R and the ggplot2 package
• Plot with ggplot2
• Plot time series data
• Arrange and export plots

Apache Spark is an open-source software for large-scale data processing and analysis. Using Apache Spark and Python (PySpark), this workshop is aimed at analyzing data sets that are too large to be handled and processed by a single computer.

In a hands-on format, participants learn to import data, and use functions to transform, reduce and compile the data. They also learn how to produce parallel algorithms that can run on Alliance clusters.

The workshop covers the following topics:

• Introduction to Big data and Map-Reduce
• Overview of Apache Spark
• Importing Data with PySpark
• Sorting data by key/value
• Working with structured data (PySpark SQL)
• Developing parallel algorithms

Parallel computing is the business of breaking a large problem into tens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller problems which can then be solved at the same time, possibly on more than one computer.  It can reduce processing time to a fraction of what it would have been, or enable you to tackle larger, more complex problems, or both. It’s widely used in big data mining, AI, time-critical simulations, and advanced graphics such as augmented or virtual reality. It’s used in fields as diverse as genetics, biotech, geographic information systems, computational fluid dynamics, medical imaging, drug discovery, and agriculture.

This session introduces the terminology and concepts of parallel programming. Learn about parallel computer architectures, approaches to parallel program design and performance measurement.

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This is a one-hour crash course in the primary tool for writing message-passing parallel programs. It covers the basic concepts of MPI, including sending and receiving messages, coordination, and data synchronization. This workshop assumes that you have some programming experience with one or more languages and have take the ACENET Basics sessions. (1 hour) (Slides)

Participants learn about the primary tool for writing shared-memory parallel programs. The session covers OpenMP and provides a short introduction to POSIX threads. You learn about the most common techniques, such as parallel for loops, barriers and critical sections. This workshop assumes that you have programming experience with one or more languages and have taken the ACENET Basics sessions. (1 hour) (Slides)

Offered annually in spring

The school is designed for participants familiar with the Linux command line and who have some level of programming experience. Completion of the ACENET Basics Series, or equivalent experience, is strongly recommended. The mornings consist of lectures, with the afternoons following a lab format, where participants are given exercises, or can bring specific problems to instructors related to their research. Topics include general parallel computing, OpenMP, GPGPU, and Message Passing Interface (MPI). (3.5 days)

Are you curious about machine learning, but not sure where to start, or if the discipline is for you? Join ACENET for a survey and explanation of several methods used to make machines learn. From simple models like Naive Bayes, Regression and Decision Trees to an introduction to Support Vector Machines and Feed-Forward Neural Networks. This talk is geared to be approachable to a novice audience, curious about machine learning, but not necessarily math or computer science majors. Methods and techniques are explained using metaphors, examples, and clear language, without diving too deeply into the math and calculus on which these techniques are based.

What do you need to make a machine learning project successful? How can you make smart decisions about setup and execution of a machine learning project? How should you hire and support the staff working on the project? We hope to provide clear, thoughtful answers to these, and other common questions to get you thinking about whether machine learning is a technology that you and your company or group should think about investing in. We discuss topics like data collection, the trade-offs involved in choosing a model, and what to expect from a successful project, as well as how to salvage useful by-products and skills when projects don’t go as planned.

This is a beginner session oriented to business owners and project managers curious to learn more about machine learning, or who may have an idea that involves machine learning and want to know where to begin.

How do computers understand language? It seems impossible that zeroes and ones could ever add up to words that humans can understand, but machine language has come a long way in the past few years. Let us take you behind the code to explain how machines simulate language comprehension, and why it’s a far more complicated problem than “bonjour = hello”.

This talk is aimed at an audience who is not necessarily familiar with computers or language comprehension, but would like a primer to the field, and what it can realistically do. We explain natural language processing from the perspective of machines that cannot understand words, but capture semantic meaning by processing data.

This tutorial is a gentle hands-on introduction to developing predictive models using deep learning artificial neural networks. It provides a high-level overview of the key elements of neural networks and deep learning (BP, CNN, LSTM), along with recent advances that allow deep networks to solve challenging problems such as object recognition in images (e.g. classification of animal or letter) and sequence prediction (e.g. next word in a sentence, like Google auto-complete). 

Participants build their own deep models using prepared software (Keras and Tensorflow) working in the browser. All necessary code is provided, however a basic level of Python programming experience is needed. 

Requirements:
A laptop or desktop with the latest version of the Chrome browser, and a Google account for using Google Drive.

Intended Audience:
Students, faculty, researchers, business professionals or anyone seeking an introduction to deep learning technology.

This workshop is delivered by the Acadia Institute for Data Analytics, hosted by ACENET.

Have you wondered how machine learning models can suddenly do so many different types of work? How is it that machines can learn things like language, vision and translation in such a short amount of time, and what has helped drive these kinds of improvements? The obvious answers - big data and big processors - are only part of the story, and to understand the full picture, we need to take a closer look at the models driving the AI revolution. This talk is aimed at people who are familiar with the basics of feed-forward neural networks, and involves an in-depth explanation of how information is represented for machines to learn on, how machines can make sense of information, and the challenges presented.

Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD, is the science of using numerical methods and computers to solve a set of partial differential equations to quantitatively predict fluid flow or heat transfer in an application. It is used in a variety of fields, from aero/hydrodynamics to energy, combustion, environmental flows, biomedical engineering and many more. Using CFD simulations significantly reduces the number of design prototypes required, saving considerable time and money in the design process - accounting for its rising importance in R&D. For example, when a boat builder designs a new vessel, it can use CFD simulations at each design iteration to test the performance of the vessel under different conditions before proceeding to the physical prototype stage.

There are numerous CFD software packages, both commercial and open-source (free), the suitability of each based on the user’s knowledge, budget, and intended application. This presentation provides an overview of some of the most popular CFD packages, their capabilities, and pros and cons, to help you choose the one that will work best for your company.

With advancements in computers and new generations of CPUs and GPUs, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is becoming an indispensable tool in many fields. Researchers and industrial design engineers are using CFD to predict and understand complex fluid flow and heat transfer problems, and to verify and optimize designs. Among open-source and commercial CFD packages, Ansys Fluent is one of the most popular commercial tools. In this workshop, you learn how to set up a small problem and solve it in Ansys Fluent on your personal computer. The instructor then demonstrates how to design and solve a large problem using a supercomputing cluster.

Many programs come as source code and a mysterious Makefile, with instructions like “make all; make install”. Here’s how it works, what can go wrong, how to fix it, and maybe even how to write your own. Participants must have some programming experience and have taken the ACENET Basics sessions.

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This workshop assumes that you have some experience with one or more programming languages. It covers some basic optimization techniques that are general in nature, as well as several tips for specific languages.

This workshop introduces researchers to the theory, key ideas, and techniques of Molecular Dynamics. A practical application targeted at biosimulations is introduced using the GROMACS package.

This workshop covers an introduction to the Python programming language, including syntax, variables and data structures. While not necessary, some experience with programming concepts would be helpful. By the end of the workshop, you should be able to read Python programs and be able to write simple ones of your own. (2 hours) (Slides)

This lecture assumes that you have some experience with the Python programming language. It covers several packages, including numpy and scipy, that are useful in doing scientific computations. Several different examples are discussed, including solving PDEs, solving systems of equations, and even doing symbolic computations.

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This workshop assumes that you have some previous Python experience. You learn many of the tools available to profile your code and find the trouble spots. Once located, the second half of the workshop presents a series of tips and tricks that may be able to help you speed up the execution of your program. 

This workshop is an introduction to the Fortran programming language. Fortran, one of the initial high-level programming languages, continues to be an excellent option for high-performance computing due to its superb performance. The newer versions of Fortran offer many modern features, including object-oriented programming capabilities to programmers. This course covers some of these features. Participants must be familiar with another programming language. 

A great deal of high-performance computing software is written in C, but few universities offer courses in the language any more. If you have to work with “legacy code” written in C, adding features, porting to a new machine, or patching errors, or if you want to write user-defined functions for engineering packages such as Fluent, then this workshop is for you.

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A great deal of high-performance computing software is written in C++, but few universities offer courses in the language any more. If you have to work with “legacy code” written in C++, adding features, porting to a new machine, or patching errors, or if you want to extend packages like OpenFOAM which are written in C++, then this workshop is for you.

C++ was designed as an extension of the C language but has its own distinct idiom or style. This workshop assumes that you already know C to the level reached in the prerequisite ACENET workshop, “C as a Second Language”.

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