Introduction to Python and Using Python in an HPC environment, 24-25 April + 28-29 April, 2025

Introduction to Python and Using Python in an HPC environment

The course is given under NAISS and is a collaboration between UPPMAX, HPC2N, LUNARC, and InfraVis

This online 4-day workshop aims to give a brief, but comprehensive introduction to using Python in a Swedish academic High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment. It covers a wide range of levels in using Python and you can decide which days to follow.

If you are a complete beginner, perhaps the first day(s) is sufficient for you, but you may follow the other days as well for inspiration. If you already are a Python programmer you could still benefit from attending the login session the first day.

The goals of the different days are

Day 1:

• Log in to a cluster
• Load the Python module
• Use variables, expressions and statements in Python

Day 2

• Load modules for site-installed Python packages
• Use and install python packages (pip and/or conda)
• Use virtual environments
• Ask for compute resources, write batch scripts for running Python
• Do basic analysis with Matplotlib in Jupyter

Day 3-4

• More about compute resources, including parallelism and GPUs
• Use Pandas and Seaborn,
• Big data and Python
• Use Python for ML/DL
• Guest lecture by Anders Hast and InfraVis introduction

This course will consist of lectures and type-alongs interspersed with hands-on sessions where you get to try out what you have just learned.

Remote/online participation: We will use Zoom. More information about connecting and about accounts and course projects and such will be sent to the participants close to the course. Tetralith at NSC will mainly be used for demos, but written material should guide users within academic Sweden on the resources they already are using.

Prerequisites: familiarity with the LINUX command line. Basic Python is NOT required, but recommended. Attend the first day for an introduction!

Preliminary Schedule: https://uppmax.github.io/HPC-python/schedule.html

Materials: Lectures and notes | Exercises | Recorded lectures and demos

Participation is free and open to all users within NAISS, whether their site has NAISS resources or not.

Please make sure you have an account at SUPR if you want to participate in the hands-on part of the training. There will be a course project that can be used to run the examples in during the hands-ons, if you do not already have an account with access. If you do not have an account at SUPR and NSC, you will be contacted with further instructions for how to create those. You are encouraged to sign up to SUPR as soon as possible after registering for the course.

Course project: As part of the hands-on, you will be given temporary access to a course project at some of NSC's systems, which will be used for running the hands-on examples. There are some policies regarding this, that we ask that you follow:

• You may be given access to the project before the course; please do not use the allocation for running your own codes in. Usage of the project before the course means the priority of jobs submitted to it goes down, diminishing the opportunity for you and your fellow participants to run the examples during the course.
• The course project will be open 1-2 weeks after the course, giving the participants the opportunity to test run examples and shorter codes related to the course. During this time, we ask that you only use it for running course related jobs. Use your own discretion, but it could be: (modified) examples from the hands-on, short personal codes that have been modified to test things learned at the course, etc.
• Anyone found to be misusing the course project, using up large amounts of the allocation for their own production runs, will be removed from the course project.
• You will likely also be given access to a storage area connected to the compute project. Any data you store there should be course-related and if you wish to save it you should copy it to somewhere else soon after the course as it will be deleted about a month later.

The course uses computing resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Super­computing in Sweden (NAISS) at NSC, partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2022-06725.

If you are affiliated with UmU, SLU, LTU, MIUN, or IRF you can use HPC2N's systems instead of NSC. If you are affiliated with LU, you can use LUNARC's resources. If you are affiliated with UU, you can use UPPMAX's resources.

Date and time: 24-25 & 28-29 April, 9-17 each day.

Location: ONLINE. Zoom link will be sent to participants a few days before the course.

Instructors: Richel Bilderbeek, Rebecca Pitts, Pedro Ojeda-May, Jayant Yadav, Björn Claremar, Birgitte Brydsö, Anders Hast

Deadline for registration: 2025-04-14

Please register by filling in the below form. Fields marked with a * are mandatory. Registration closed!