In addition to maintaining extensive on-line documentation, CCR staff provide a wide variety of training, including hosting workshops. Topics include fundamentals of parallel computing, introduction to CCR, debugging and profiling tools, bioinformatics resources,etc. Individual and group training sessions/workshops are also available upon request.

Next scheduled workshops:

• Introduction to Using CCR - February 26, 2008
  • 4:00pm-5:00pm
  • Mathematics Building, Room 250
  • This seminar serves as an introduction to using the Center's large Dell Linux cluster. Topics of discussion start with login, data transfer, and overview of basic Linux/Unix commands. The user environment, task monitoring and code compilation are highlighted. The seminar closes with an introduction to basic performance analysis.

• Introduction to Running Applications at CCR - April 1, 2008
  • 4:00pm-5:00pm
  • Mathematics Building, Room 250
  • This seminar serves as an introduction to running programs on CCR's U2 compute cluster. The U2 cluster is the largest computational platform in UB's Center for Computational Research, with over 2000 processors. Users run on U2 by submitting jobs through a batch scheduler. A brief overview of batch computing will be presented. Topics include the creation and submission of jobs, as well as analysis of queue and job status. Examples and demonstrations will be given as time permits.

North Campus Office Hours

Contents

User Guides and Tutorials

Introduction to CCR/Linux for HPC (ppt) (pdf)

• Presentation given to HPC 1 and CSE603 on August 27, 2008.

Introduction to Using CCR Tutorial (pdf)

• Login and file transfer.
• Brief introduction to linux/unix commands.
• Explanation of the CCR user environment.
• Basic task monitoring and compilation of codes.

PBS Users Guide (pdf)

• CCR uses a batch queuing system to run user applications on the clusters.
• This is a tutorial on understanding and using the PBS/Torque batch queuing system.

Introduction to CFX on U2 (pdf)

• Introduction to using CFX on the U2 cluster.
• CFX is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application.
  • This tool is used to analyze the motion of liquids and gases.

Introduction to WebMO (tutorial web page)

• An online tutorial on using the WebMO interface provided by CCR.

Practical Performance Profiling-Optimization (pdf)

• Using profiling tools to understand and optimize (sequential and parallel) applications.

MPI on CCR Systems Quick Reference (pdf)

• Handy short reference for compiling and running MPI applications on CCR systems.

Parallel Programming Overview (pdf)

• Introduction to parallel programming (emphasis on APIs available at CCR, such as MPI and OpenMP).

Intermediate MPI (pdf)

• Basic Message Passing with MPI

Advanced MPI (pdf)

• More advanced MPI features (derived types, communicators/groups, topologies).

Introduction to OpenMP (pdf)

• Basic shared memory parallelization with OpenMP directives and API.

Practical Issues in OpenMP (pdf)

• More advanced topics and considerations for OpenMP.

Grid Application Workshop (pdf)

• Introduction to running scientific applications on the Grid.

Workshops

Currently Scheduled Workshop

• Introduction to Using CCR
• Basic Parallel Computing

Upcoming Workshops

• Introduction to Monitoring, Performance Analysis, and Debugging

Outreach Workshops

• Eric Pitman Annual Workshop in Computational Science
• Summer High School Workshops
• K-12 Workshops

Courses

Computer Modeling of Biological Systems

• Introduction to computational methods for molecular modeling of biological systems. This course is designed to serve as an introduction to computational methods for molecular modeling of biological systems such as proteins and nucleic acids. The goal is to provide a general overview of computational quantum chemistry, molecular mechanics, and combined QM/MM methods, as applied to molecules of biological interest.
• This is a three part series of courses offered by the Department of Chemistry, University at Buffalo.
• University at Buffalo course schedules.
• Course number: CHE 512

High Performance Computing I

• This course will introduce students to the fundamental ideas of scientific computing on high performance architectures. The principal objective of this course is to enable students to use high performance computers in all aspects of scientific computing to support research activities. At the end of the class, you should be able to: design and implement efficient algorithms for high performance computing related to a variety of research areas, use MPI, OpenMP and other special tools used to program large multi-processor computers, understand the basic operating principles of these machines, and, analyze the performance of your codes.
• University at Buffalo course schedules.
• Course number: MAE 609, PHY 515, MTH 667, CE 620

Advanced Numerical Methods: Spectral Methods for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)

• Spectral methods are high order methods based on global polynomials such as the trigonometric or orthogonal polynomials, and they yield the so-called exponential or spectral convergence when smooth problems are considered. Due to such high order accuracy, spectral methods have been actively applied to various problems in applied mathematics. This course will introduce spectral methods with emphasis on both the theory and applications. The methodology of spectral methods will be derived for various PDEs such as wave equations, heat equations, and nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws. Recent developments of the spectral methods for non-smooth problems and the discontinuous Galerkin methods will be also covered. Students who take this course will have an understanding of the spectral methods and be able to apply them to real computational problems.
• University at Buffalo course schedules.
• Course number: MTH 637 (Prof. Jae-Hun Jung)

Certification

Advanced Certificate in Computational Science

• This Advanced (Graduate) Certificate in Computational Science is designed to provide students at the University at Buffalo with training in advanced scientific computing in combination with specialized education in traditional disciplines of science and engineering.